ATTENTO: ATTENTion Observed for automated spectator crowd analysis

Abstract

We propose a new type of crowd analysis, focused on the spectator crowd, that is, people "interested in watching something specific that they came to see" [1]. This scenario applies on stadiums, amphitheaters etc., and shares some aspects with classical crowd monitoring: actually, many people are simultaneously observed, so that per-person analysis is hard; however, here the dynamics of humans is more constrained, due to the architectural environment in which they are situated; specifically, people are expected to stay in a fixed location most of the time, limiting their activities to applaud, support/heckle the players or discuss with the neighbors. In this paper, we start facing this challenge by considering hockey matches, locating a videocamera 25-30 meters far from the bleachers, pointing at the crowd: in this scenario, aggregations of spectators that exhibit similar behavior are detected, and the behavior is classified into a set of predefined classes, highlighting the overall excitement. To these aims, in a first step we focus on individual frames, clustering local flow measures into spatial regions. The clustering is then extended by adding the temporal axis into the analysis, looking for non-randomic spatio-temporal clusters; for this purpose, the Lempel-Ziv complexity is considered. This way, choral activities can emerge, indicating for example fan groups belonging to different teams. After this, with the adoption of entropic measures, the degree of excitement of such groups can be quantified. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.