High Fidelity Human Trajectory Tracking Based on Surveillance Camera Data

Abstract

Human crowds exhibit a wide range of interesting patterns, and measuring them is of great interest in areas ranging from psychology and social science to civil engineering. While \textit{in situ} measurements of human crowd patterns require large amounts of time and labor to obtain, human crowd experiments may result in statistics different from those that would emerge with a naturally emerging crowd. Here we present a simple, broadly applicable, highly accurate human crowd tracking technique to extract high-fidelity kinematic information from widely available surveillance camera videos. With the proposed technique, researchers can access scientific crowd data on a scale that is orders of magnitude larger than before. In addition to being able to measure an individual's time-resolved position and velocity, our technique also offers high validity time-resolved acceleration and step frequency, and step length. We demonstrate the applicability of our technique by applying it to surveillance camera videos in Tokyo Shinjuku streamed on YouTube and exploiting its high fidelity to expose the hidden contribution of walking speed variance at the crossroad. The high fidelity and simplicity of this powerful technique open up the way to utilize the large volume of existing surveillance camera data around the world for scientific studies.