Change Detection in Human Crowds

This paper presents a method to detect unusual behavior in human crowds based on histograms of velocities in world coordinates. A combination of background removal and optical flow is used to extract the global motion at each image frame, discarding small motion vectors due artifacts such as noise, non-stationary background pixels and compression issues. Using a calibrated camera, the global motion can be estimated, and it is used to build a 2D histogram containing information of speed and direction for all frames. Each frame is compared with a set of previous frames by using a histogram comparison metric, resulting in a similarity vector. This vector is then used to determine changes in the crowd behavior, also allowing a classification based on the nature of the change in time: short or long-term changes. The method was tested on publicly available datasets involving crowded scenarios.