A Graphical Simulator for Modeling Complex Crowd Behaviors

Abnormal crowd behaviors of varied real-world settings could represent or pose serious threat to public safety. The video data required for relevant analysis are often difficult to acquire due to security, privacy and data protection issues. Without large amounts of realistic crowd data, it is difficult to develop and verify crowd behavioral models, event detection techniques, and corresponding test and evaluations. This paper presented a synthetic method for generating crowd movements and tendency based on existing social and behavioral studies. Graph and tree searching algorithms as well as game engine-enabled techniques have been adopted in the study. The main outcomes of this research include a categorization model for entity-based behaviors following a linear aggregation approach; and the construction of an innovative agent-based pipeline for the synthesis of A-Star path-finding algorithm and an enhanced Social Force Model. A Spatial-Temporal Texture (STT) technique has been adopted for the evaluation of the model’s effectiveness. Tests have highlighted the visual similarities between STTs extracted from the simulations and their counterparts – video recordings - from the real-world.