Detection and tracking of groups in crowd

We propose a method to detect and track interacting people by employing a framework based on a Social Force Model (SFM). The method embeds plausible human behaviors to predict interactions in a crowd by iteratively minimizing the error between predictions and measurements. We model people approaching a group and restrict the group formation based on the relative velocity of candidate group members. The detected groups are then tracked by linking their interaction centers over time using a buffered graph-based tracker. We show how the proposed framework outperforms existing group localization techniques on three publicly available datasets, with improvements of up to 13% on group detection.