Multimedia surveillance in event detection: Crowd analytics in hajj

Abstract

Multimedia surveillance systems have evolved in recent years to capture, process and analyze multimedia data coming from heterogeneous sensors in the context of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Hajj. Systems in these contexts are often designed to support decision making, such as responding to alerts triggered by sensors and incidents detected by surveillance systems as well as to provide useful information for monitoring and emergency-response teams concerned with health and public safety. Various tools and techniques from different fields such as operations research, computer vision, image and video processing, pattern recognition, and multimedia fusion have contributed to the proliferation of such systems in the context of Hajj. In this paper, a systematic review and synthesis of the representative works that have been done in the field of multimedia surveillance for event detection in Hajj is presented. Observations and reflections on these works are discussed in the context of Hajj rituals' distinctive characteristics, crowd-management challenges, and multimedia issues related to event detection and surveillance systems in Hajj. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.