Hierarchical crowd analysis and anomaly detection

Objective: This work proposes a novel approach to model the spatiotemporal distribution of crowd motions and detect anomalous events. Methods: We first learn the regions of interest (ROIs) which inform the behavioral patterns by trajectory analysis with Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes (HDP), so that the main trends of crowd motions can be modeled. Based on the ROIs, we then build a series of histograms both on global and local levels as the templates for the observed movement distribution, which statistically describes time-correlated crowd events. Once the template has been built hierarchically, we import real data containing the discrete trajectory observations from video surveillance and detect abnormal events for individuals and for crowds. Results: Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach, which is able to analyze and extract the crowd motion information from observed trajectory dataset, and achieve the anomaly detection at the hierarchical levels. Conclusion: The proposed hierarchical approach can learn the moving trends of crowd both in global and local area and describe the crowd behaviors in statistical way, which build a template for pedestrian movement distribution that allows for the detection of time-correlated abnormal crowd events. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.