Data Fusion for Intelligent Crowd Monitoring and Management Systems: A Survey

Intelligent Crowd Monitoring and Management Systems (ICMMSs) have become effective resources for strengthening safety and security along with enhancing early-warning capabilities to manage emergencies in crowded situations of smart cities and massive gatherings events. The main advantage of such systems is their ability to detect multiple features associated with the crowd gathering, as they enable multi-source sensors, multi-modal data, and powerful intelligent and analytical methods. Unlike traditional crowd monitoring systems, which make use of simplex forms of different data types, data and information associated with crowded scenarios can be collected, fused, processed and analyzed in large quantities for accurate global assessment and enhanced decision making processes in an ICMMS. Therefore, data fusion is introduced as an enabler to decrease data quantity, reduce data dimensions, and improve data quality. In this paper, we first survey the literature on data fusion application in crowd monitoring systems as we are developing a state-of-the-art ICMMS with data fusion as a major platform enabler. Next, we discuss some popular data fusion architectures and classifications from different perspectives. Based on this, we propose a multi-sensor, multi-modal, and dimensional ICMMS architecture based on data fusion. Then, we identify the data fusion processes in the ICMMS and classify them into sensor fusion, feature-based data fusion, and decision fusion. Relevant algorithms, applications and examples of three classes are elaborated. Finally, future data fusion research directions are discussed.