A Data-Driven Framework for Visual Crowd Analysis

Abstract

We present a novel approach for analyzing the quality of multi-agent crowd simulation algorithms. Our approach is data-driven, taking as input a set of user-defined metrics and reference training data, either synthetic or from video footage of real crowds. Given a simulation, we formulate the crowd analysis problem as an anomaly detection problem and exploit state-of-the-art outlier detection algorithms to address it. To that end, we introduce a new framework for the visual analysis of crowd simulations. Our framework allows us to capture potentially erroneous behaviors on a per-agent basis either by automatically detecting outliers based on individual evaluation metrics or by accounting for multiple evaluation criteria in a principled fashion using Principle Component Analysis and the notion of Pareto Optimality. We discuss optimizations necessary to allow real-time performance on large datasets and demonstrate the applicability of our framework through the analysis of simulations created by several widely-used methods, including a simulation from a commercial game.