Structured learning for detection of social groups in crowd

Group detection in crowds will play a key role in future behavior analysis surveillance systems. In this work we build a new Structural SVM-based learning framework able to solve the group detection task by exploiting annotated video data to deduce a sociologically motivated distance measure founded on Hall´s proxemics and Granger´s causality. We improve over state-of-the-art results even in the most crowded test scenarios, while keeping the classification time affordable for quasi-real time applications. A new scoring scheme specifically designed for the group detection task is also proposed.