Estimation of Crowd Density in Public Areas Based on Neural Network

There are nowadays strong demands for intelligent surveillance systems, which can infer or understand more complex behavior. The application of crowd density estimation methods could lead to a better understanding of crowd behavior, improved design of the built environment, and increased pedestrian safety. In this paper, we propose a new crowd density estimation method, which aims at estimating not only a moving crowd, but also a stationary crowd, using images captured from surveillance cameras situated in various public locations. The crowd density of the moving people is measured, based on the moving area during a specified time period. The moving area is defined as the area where the magnitude of the accumulated optical flow exceeds a predefined threshold. In contrast, the stationary crowd density is estimated from the coarseness of textures, under the assumption that each person can be regarded as a textural unit. A multilayer neural network is designed, to classify crowd density levels into 5 classes. Finally, the proposed method is experimented with PETS 2009 and the platform of Gangnam subway station image sequences.