Sparse people group and crowd detection using spatial point statistics in airborne images

Crowd monitoring is an important task of security forces. If an emergency occurs during large events, authorities should take urgent measures to prevent causalities. Also understanding crowd dynamics such as tracking crowds or sparse people goups before an emergency occurs is a need. Therefore, crowd detection and analysis is a critical research area. There are several studies for crowd monitoring that use street or indoor cameras which may not be directly used for analyzing large crowds. In this study, we approach the problem using aerial images. We propose two novel methods. In the first method, we use first-order spatial point statistics. It uses the nearest neighbor relations for each person in the image to detect crowd regions. Our second method also uses the first order statistics with an additional sparse people group detection flexibility. We test the proposed methods on two aerial images and provide quantitative test results.