Multi-Person Tracking and Crowd Behavior Detection via Particles Gradient Motion Descriptor and Improved Entropy Classifier

To prevent disasters and to control and supervise crowds, automated video surveillance has become indispensable. In today’s complex and crowded environments, manual surveillance and monitoring systems are inefficient, labor intensive, and unwieldy. Automated video surveillance systems offer promising solutions, but challenges remain. One of the major challenges is the extraction of true foregrounds of pixels representing humans only. Furthermore, to accurately understand and interpret crowd behavior, human crowd behavior (HCB) systems require robust feature extraction methods, along with powerful and reliable decision-making classifiers. In this paper, we describe our approach to these issues by presenting a novel Particles Force Model for multi-person tracking, a vigorous fusion of global and local descriptors, along with a robust improved entropy classifier for detecting and interpreting crowd behavior. In the proposed model, necessary preprocessing steps are followed by the application of a first distance algorithm for the removal of background clutter; true-foreground elements are then extracted via a Particles Force Model. The detected human forms are then counted by labeling and performing cluster estimation, using a K-nearest neighbors search algorithm. After that, the location of all the human silhouettes is fixed and, using the Jaccard similarity index and normalized cross-correlation as a cost function, multi-person tracking is performed. For HCB detection, we introduced human crowd contour extraction as a global feature and a particles gradient motion (PGD) descriptor, along with geometrical and speeded up robust features (SURF) for local features. After features were extracted, we applied bat optimization for optimal features, which also works as a pre-classifier. Finally, we introduced a robust improved entropy classifier for decision making and automated crowd behavior detection in smart surveillance systems. We evaluated the performance of our proposed system on a publicly available benchmark PETS2009 and UMN dataset. Experimental results show that our system performed better compared to existing well-known state-of-the-art methods by achieving higher accuracy rates. The proposed system can be deployed to great benefit in numerous public places, such as airports, shopping malls, city centers, and train stations to control, supervise, and protect crowds.

Comparison of FairMOT-VGG16 and MCMOT Implementation for Multi-Object Tracking and Gender Detection on Mall CCTV

The crowd detection system on CCTV has proven to be useful for retail and shopping sector owners in mall areas. The data can be used as a guide by shopping center owners to find out the number of visitors who enter at a certain time. However, such information was still insufficient. The need for richer data has led to the development of more specific person detection which involves gender. Gender detection can provide specific information on the number of men and women visiting a particular location. However, gender detection alone does not provide an identity label for every detection that occurs, so it needs to be combined with a multi-person tracking system. This study compares two tracking methods with gender detection, namely FairMOT with gender classification and MCMOT. The first method produces MOTA, MOTP, IDS, and FPS of 78.56, 79.57, 19, and 24.4, while the second method produces 69.84, 81.94, 147, and 30.5. In addition, evaluation of gender was also carried out where the first method resulted in a gender accuracy of 65\% while the second method was 62.35\%.

The Impact of the Detector on the Performances of a Multi Person Tracking System

Background: Pedestrian detection and tracking is an important area of study in real-world applications such as mobile robots, human-computer interaction, video surveillance, pedestrian protection systems, etc. As a result, it has attracted the interest of the scientific community. Objective: Certainly, tracking people is critical for numerous utility areas which cover unusual situations detection, like vicinity evaluation and sometimes change direction in human gait and partial occlusions. Researchers primary focus is to develop surveillance system that can work in a dynamic environment, but there are major issues and challenges involved in designing such systems. So, it has become a major issue and challenge to design a tracking system that can be more suitable for such situations. To this end, this paper presents a comparative evaluation of the tracking-by-detection system along with the publicly available pedestrian benchmark databases. Method: Unlike recent works where the person detection and tracking are usually treated separately, our work explores the joint use of the popular Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (SORT) method and the relevant visual detectors. Consequently, the choice of the detector is an important factor in the evaluation of the system performance. Results: Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the tracking-by-detection system is closely related to the optimal selection of the detector and should be required prior to a rigorous evaluation. Conclusion: The study demonstrates how sensitive the system performance as a whole is to the challenging of the dataset. Furthermore, the efficiency of the detector and the detector-tracker combination are also depending on the dataset.