Experiment and analysis on microscopic characteristics of pedestrian movement in building bottleneck

In this paper, evacuation experiments are carried out to study pedestrian movement behaviors in building bottleneck. An image processing method based on mean-shift algorithm is used to extract pedestrian movement trajectory. Based on the extracted trajectory, we analyze the microscopic movement characteristics of pedestrians such as lane formation, change of velocity and distance between two sequential pedestrians. A pedestrian lane is a group of pedestrians moving in a column. The lane formation is verified by the pedestrian trajectory and distribution of pedestrian’s lateral positions (x direction in the paper): lane number changes from one to two, three or even more with the increasing bottleneck width when pedestrians pass through the bottleneck. By analyzing the pedestrian movement behaviors in the same pedestrian lane, we find three typical movement modes in the bottleneck: time-lag acceleration, synchronous acceleration, and avoiding deceleration. Through analyzing the time intervals when successive pedestrians pass through the bottleneck, we find that most pedestrians adjust their velocities according to the distance to the forward pedestrians. Results also indicate that due to different cultures, pedestrians flux in China and Germany may have some differences besides their similarities.