Self-Organizing maps for the automatic interpretation of crowd dynamics

This paper introduces the use of self-organizing maps for the visualization of crowd dynamics and to learn models of the dominant motions of crowds in complex scenes. The self-organizing map (SOM) model is a well known dimensionality reduction method proved to bear resemblance with characteristics of the human brain, representing sensory input by topologically ordered computational maps. This paper proposes algorithms to learn and compare crowd dynamics with the SOM model. Different information is employed as input to the used SOM. Qualitative and quantitative results are presented in the paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008