Estimation of crowd behavior using sensor networks and sensor fusion

Commonly, surveillance operators are today monitoring a large number of CCTV screens, trying to solve the complex cognitive tasks of analyzing crowd behavior and detecting threats and other abnormal behavior. Information overload is a rule rather than an exception. Moreover, CCTV footage lacks important indicators revealing certain threats, and can also in other respects be complemented by data from other sensors. This article presents an approach to automatically interpret sensor data and estimate behaviors of groups of people in order to provide the operator with relevant warnings. We use data from distributed heterogeneous sensors (visual cameras and a thermal infrared camera), and process the sensor data using detection algorithms. The extracted features are fed into a hidden Markov model in order to model normal behavior and detect deviations. We also discuss the use of radars for weapon detection.