Video-based Bottleneck Detection utilizing Lagrangian Dynamics in Crowded Scenes

Avoiding bottleneck situations in crowds is critical for the safety and comfort of people at large events or in public transportation. Based on the work of Lagrangian motion analysis we propose a novel video-based bottleneck-detector by identifying characteristic stowage patterns in crowd-movements captured by optical flow fields. The Lagrangian framework allows to assess complex time-dependent crowd-motion dynamics at large temporal scales near the bottleneck by two dimensional Lagrangian fields. In particular we propose long-term temporal filtered Finite Time Lyapunov Exponents (FTLE) fields that provide towards a more global segmentation of the crowd movements and allows to capture its deformations when a crowd is passing a bottleneck. Finally, these deformations are used for an automatic spatio-temporal detection of such situations. The performance of the proposed approach is shown in extensive evaluations on the existing Jülich and AGO-RASET datasets, that we have updated with ground truth data for spatio-temporal bottleneck analysis.