Measuring Crowd Collectiveness

Bolei Zhou, Xiaoou Tang, Xiaogang Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 3049-3056

Collective motions are common in crowd systems and have attracted a great deal of attention in a variety of multidisciplinary fields. Collectiveness, which indicates the degree of individuals acting as a union in collective motion, is a fundamental and universal measurement for various crowd systems. By integrating path similarities among crowds on collective manifold, this paper proposes a descriptor of collectiveness and an efficient computation for the crowd and its constituent individuals. The algorithm of the Collective Merging is then proposed to detect collective motions from random motions. We validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed collectiveness descriptor on the system of self-driven particles. We then compare the collectiveness descriptor to human perception for collective motion and show high consistency. Our experiments regarding the detection of collective motions and the measurement of collectiveness in videos of pedestrian crowds and bacteria colony demonstrate a wide range of applications of the collectiveness descriptor 1 .