Energy level-based abnormal crowd behavior detection

The change of crowd energy is a fundamental measurement for describing a crowd behavior. In this paper, we present a crowd abnormal detection method based on the change of energy-level distribution. The method can not only reduce the camera perspective effect, but also detect crowd abnormal behavior in time. Pixels in the image are treated as particles, and the optical flow method is adopted to extract the velocities of particles. The qualities of different particles are distributed as a different value according to the distance between the particle and the camera to reduce the camera perspective effect. Then a crowd motion segmentation method based on flow field texture representation is utilized to extract the motion foreground, and a linear interpolation calculation is applied to pedestrian’s foreground area to determine their distance to the camera. This contributes to the calculation of the particle qualities in different locations. Finally, the crowd behavior is analyzed according to the change of the consistency, entropy and contrast of the three descriptors for co-occurrence matrix. By calculating a threshold, the timestamp when the crowd abnormal happens is determined. In this paper, multiple sets of videos from three different scenes in UMN dataset are employed in the experiment. The results show that the proposed method is effective in characterizing anomalies in videos.