Crowd Behavior Analysis

Over the last several years there has been a growing interest in developing computational methodologies for modeling and analyzing movements and behaviors of crowds of people. This interest spans several scientific areas that includes Computer vision, Computer Graphics, and pedestrian Evacuation Dynamics. Despite the fact that these different scientific fields are trying to model the same physical entity (i. e. crowd of people), research ideas have evolved independently. As a result each discipline has developed techniques and perspectives that are characteristically its own. In this chapter we provide a brief overview of major research themes from these different scientific fields, discuss common challenges and point to problem areas that will benefit from common synthesis of perspectives from these fields. In addition we introduce various pieces of work that appear in this vision based analysis