Identification of crowd behaviour patterns using stability analysis

Crowd behaviour analysis and management have become a significant research problem for the last few years because of the substantial growth in the world population and their security requirements. There are numerous unsolved problems like crowd flow modelling and crowd behaviour detection, which are still open in this area, seeking great attention from the research community. Crowd flow modelling is one of such problems, and it is also an integral part of an intelligent surveillance system. Modelling of crowd flow has now become a vital concern in the development of intelligent surveillance systems. Real-time analysis of crowd behavior needs accurate models that represent crowded scenarios. An intelligent surveillance system supporting a good crowd flow model will help identify the risks in a wide range of emergencies and facilitate human safety. Mathematical models of crowd flow developed from real-time video sequences enable further analysis and decision making. A novel method identifying eight possible crowd flow behaviours commonly seen in the crowd video sequences is explained in this paper. The proposed method uses crowd flow localisation using the Gunnar-Farneback optical flow method. The Jacobian and Hessian matrix analysis along with corresponding eigenvalues helps to find stability points identifying the flow patterns. This work is carried out on 80 videos taken from UCF crowd and CUHK video datasets. Comparison with existing works from the literature proves our method yields better results.