Correlation dimension of collective versus individual pedestrian movement patterns in crowd-quakes: A case-study

Video recording right before the Love Parade, Duisburg (Germany) crowd-quake, occurred on 24 July 2010, has been analysed in order to investigate the spatial properties of the crowd (collective case) and those of the single pedestrians in the crowd (individual case). The Grassberger–Procaccia correlation dimension, well known to be able to distinguish patterns in spatial point processes, was used. Our results for this case-study reveal that crowd and single pedestrians are characterized by different spatial behaviour: the whole crowd behaves as a quasi-homogeneous spatial point process through time, with an averaged correlation dimension of about 1.92; while the single pedestrians show a quite large variation of correlation dimensions indicating different spatial patterns, ranging from clustered to quasi-homogeneous.