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Crowded event entrances could threaten the comfort and safety of pedestrians, especially when some pedestrians push others or use gaps in crowds to gain faster access to an event. Studying and understanding pushing dynamics leads to designing and building more comfortable and safe entrances. Researchers-to understand pushing dynamics-observe and analyze recorded videos to manually identify when and where pushing behavior occurs. Despite the accuracy of the manual method, it can still be time-consuming, tedious, and hard to identify pushing behavior in some scenarios. In this article, we propose a hybrid deep learning and visualization framework that aims to assist researchers in automatically identifying pushing behavior in videos. The proposed framework comprises two main components: (i) Deep optical flow and wheel visualization; to generate motion information maps. (ii) A combination of an EfficientNet-B0-based classifier and a false reduction algorithm for detecting pushing behavior at the video patch level. In addition to the framework, we present a new patch-based approach to enlarge the data and alleviate the class imbalance problem in small-scale pushing behavior datasets. Experimental results (using real-world ground truth of pushing behavior videos) demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves an 86% accuracy rate. Moreover, the EfficientNet-B0-based classifier outperforms baseline CNN-based classifiers in terms of accuracy.

Over the past few years, real-time visualisation of pedestrian dynamics has become more crucial to successfully organise and monitor open-crowded events. However, the process of collecting, efficiently handling and visualising a large volume of pedestrians' dynamic data in real time is challenging. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when pedestrians move in large-size, high-density, open and complex environments. In this article, we propose an efficient and accurate approach to acquire, process and visualise pedestrians' dynamic behaviour in real time. Our goal in this context is to produce GPS-based heat maps that assist event organisers as well as visitors in dynamically finding crowded spots using their smartphone devices. To validate our proposal, we have developed a prototype system for experimentally evaluating the quality of the proposed solution using real-world and simulation-based experimental datasets. The first phase of experiments was conducted in an open area with 37,000 square meters in Palestine. In the second phase, we have carried out a simulation for 5000 pedestrians to quantify the level of efficiency of the proposed system. We have utilised PHP scripting language to generate a larger-scale sample of randomly moving pedestrians across the same open area. A comparison with two well-known Web-based spatial data visualisation systems was conducted in the third phase. Findings indicate that the proposed approach can collect pedestrian's GPS-based trajectory information within 4 m horizontal accuracy in real time. The system demonstrated high efficiency in processing, storing, retrieving and visualising pedestrians' motion data (in the form of heat maps) in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the factors that control the dynamics of pedestrians is a crucial step towards modeling and building various pedestrian-oriented simulation systems. In this article, we empirically explore the influential factors that control the single-file movement of pedestrians and their impact. Our goal in this context is to apply feed-forward neural networks to predict and understand the individual speeds for different densities of pedestrians. With artificial neural networks, we can approximate the fitting function that describes pedestrians' movement without having modeling bias. Our analysis is focused on the distances and range of interactions across neighboring pedestrians. As indicated by previous research, we find that the speed of pedestrians depends on the distance to the predecessor. Yet, in contrast to classical purely anisotropic approaches—which are based on vision fields and assume that the interaction mainly depends on the distance in front—our results demonstrate that the distance to the follower also significantly influences movement. Using the distance to the follower combined with the subject pedestrian's headway distance to predict the speed improves the estimation by 18% compared to the prediction using the space in front alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]