Engineering Commons^™

Taming Crowded Visual Scenes, Saad Ali

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Computer vision algorithms have played a pivotal role in commercial video surveillance systems for a number of years. However, a common weakness among these systems is their inability to handle crowded scenes. In this thesis, we have developed algorithms that overcome some of the challenges encountered in videos of crowded environments such as sporting events, religious festivals, parades, concerts, train stations, airports, and malls. We adopt a top-down approach by first performing a global-level analysis that locates dynamically distinct crowd regions within the video. This knowledge is then employed in the detection of abnormal behaviors and tracking of individual targets …