Understanding People Flow in Transportation Hubs

In this paper, we aim to monitor the flow of people in large public infrastructures. We propose an unsupervised methodology to cluster people flow patterns into the most typical and meaningful configurations. By processing 3D images from a network of depth cameras, we built a descriptor for the flow pattern. We define a data-irregularity measure that assesses how well each descriptor fits a data model. This allows us to rank the flow patterns from highly distinctive (outliers) to very common ones and, discarding outliers, obtain more reliable key configurations (classes). We applied this methodology in an operational scenario during 18 days in the X-ray screening area of an international airport. Results show that our methodology is able to summarize the representative patterns, a relevant information for airport management. Beyond regular flows our method identifies a set of rare events corresponding to uncommon activities (cleaning, special security and circulating staff). We demonstrate that for such a long observation period our methodology encapsulates the relevant “states” of the infrastructure in a very compact way.