Crowd Behavior Analysis via Curl and Divergence of Motion Trajectories

In the field of crowd behavior analysis, existing methods mainly focus on using local representations inspired by models found in other disciplines (e.g., fluid dynamics and social dynamics) to describe motion patterns. However, less attention is paid to exploiting motion structures (e.g., visual information contained in trajectories) for behavior analysis. In this paper, we consider both local characteristics and global structures of a motion vector field, and propose the Curl and Divergence of motion Trajectories (CDT) descriptors to describe collective motion patterns. To this end, a trajectory-based motion coding algorithm is designed to extract the CDT descriptors. For each motion vector field we construct its conjugate field, in which each vector is perpendicular to the counterpart in the original vector field. The trajectories in the motion and corresponding conjugate fields indicate the tangential and radial motion structures, respectively. By integrating curl (and divergence, respectively) along the tangential paths (and the radial paths, respectively), the CDT descriptors are extracted. We show that the proposed motion descriptors are scale- and rotation-invariant for effective crowd behavior analysis. For concreteness, we apply the CDT descriptors to identify five typical crowd behaviors (lane, clockwise arch, counterclockwise arch, bottleneck and fountainhead) with a pipeline including motion decomposition. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the CDT descriptors for describing and classifying crowd behaviors.