Crowd Scenes

Group and Crowd Behavior for Computer Vision provides a multidisciplinary perspective on how to solve the problem of group and crowd analysis and modeling, combining insights from the social sciences with technological ideas in computer vision and pattern recognition. The book answers many unresolved issues in group and crowd behavior, with Part One providing an introduction to the problems of analyzing groups and crowds that stresses that they should not be considered as completely diverse entities, but as an aggregation of people. Part Two focuses on features and representations with the aim of recognizing the presence of groups and crowds in image and video data. It discusses low level processing methods to individuate when and where a group or crowd is placed in the scene, spanning from the use of people detectors toward more ad-hoc strategies to individuate group and crowd formations. Part Three discusses methods for analyzing the behavior of groups and the crowd once they have been detected, showing how to extract semantic information, predicting/tracking the movement of a group, the formation or disaggregation of a group/crowd and the identification of different kinds of groups/crowds depending on their behavior. The final section focuses on identifying and promoting datasets for group/crowd analysis and modeling, presenting and discussing metrics for evaluating the pros and cons of the various models and methods. This book gives computer vision researcher techniques for segmentation and grouping, tracking and reasoning for solving group and crowd modeling and analysis, as well as more general problems in computer vision and machine learning. Presents the first book to cover the topic of modeling and analysis of groups in computer vision Discusses the topics of group and crowd modeling from a cross-disciplinary perspective, using social science anthropological theories translated into computer vision algorithms Focuses on group and crowd analysis metrics Discusses real industrial systems dealing with the problem of analyzing groups and crowds

The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses-the crowd scenes-in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions

In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary notions of collectivity: the crowd and rumour. The plays illustrate that rumour and crowd are mutually dependent; they also betray a fascination with the fact that crowd and rumour make individuality disappear. Shakespeare dramatizes these mechanisms, relating the crowd to class conflict, to rhetoric, to the theatre and to the organization of the state; and linking rumour to fear, to fame and to philosophical doubt. Paying attention to all levels of collectivity, Wiegandt emphasizes the close relationship between the crowd onstage and the Elizabethan audience. He argues that there was a significant - and sometimes precarious - metatheatrical blurring between the crowd on the stage and the crowd around the stage in performances of crowd scenes. The book's focus on crowd and rumour provides fresh insights on the central problems of some of Shakespeare's most contentiously debated plays, and offers an alternative to the dominant tradition of celebrating Shakespeare as the origin of modern individualism.

Crowd computing, crowdsourcing, crowd-associated network (CrAN), crowd-assisted sensing are some examples of crowd-based concepts that harness the power of people on the web or connected via web-like infrastructure to do tasks that are often difficult for individual users or computers to do alone. This creates many challenging issues like assessing reliability and correctness of crowd generated information, delivery of data and information via crowd, middleware for supporting crowdsourcing and crowd computing tasks, crowd associated networking and its security, Quality of Information (QoI) issues, etc. This book compiles the latest advances in the relevant fields.

American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence examines spectatorship in American literature at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on texts by Theodore Dreiser, Miriam Michelson, Irvin S. Cobb, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The spectator functions as a lens through which we view the relationship between violence and social change as depicted in the politically-charged crowds of fictional lynch mob scenes that expose the central tension of American democracy—the struggle for balance between the rights of the individual and the demands of the community. This has played out in American fiction through clashes between crowds and the primarily rural images that have so often been used to describe America. While this pastoral vision of America has dominated the study of American literature, this book argues for a reassessment of fiction that takes into consideration that the way the country defines itself collectively is as significant as the way its people define themselves individually. This study distinguishes itself from others by bringing together journalism, crowds, lynching, spectatorship, and literature in new and innovative ways that uncover how American literature at the turn of the twentieth century confronted and pushed beyond passive observation and static visual performances, which are traditionally associated with the terms "spectator" and "spectacle." The crowds in fictional lynch mob scenes clash with the idea of positive collective action because the crowd's vigilantism defies legitimate legal and democratic processes. Lynch mobs, in contrast to other crowds like strikes or political rallies, do not reclaim the democratic process from the control of the powerful and wealthy, but rather oppose those practices violently without regard to justice. As a figure who is simultaneously within and outside the crowd, the spectator (often in the form of a reporter character) is in a unique position to express the fractures occurring between the individual and the collective in American society. Racial conflicts are a key aspect of the crowd scenes examined. American writers contended with these issues by using the spectator to observe, question, and challenge readers to consider the impact on the structure of American society.

Research into the methods and techniques used in simulating crowds has developed extensively within the last few years, particularly in the areas of video games and film. Despite recent impressive results when simulating and rendering thousands of individuals, many challenges still exist in this area. The comparison of simulation with reality, the realistic appearance of virtual humans and their behavior, group structure and their motion, and collision avoidance are just some examples of these challenges. For most of the applications of crowds, it is now a requirement to have real-time simulations – which is an additional challenge, particularly when crowds are very large. Crowd Simulation analyses these challenges in depth and suggests many possible solutions. Daniel Thalmann and Soraia Musse share their experiences and expertise in the application of: · Population modeling · Virtual human animation · Behavioral models for crowds · The connection between virtual and real crowds · Path planning and navigation · Visual attention models · Geometric and populated semantic environments · Crowd rendering The second edition presents techniques and methods developed since the authors first covered the simulation of crowds in 2007. Crowd Simulation includes in-depth discussions on the techniques of path planning, including a new hybrid approach between navigation graphs and potential-based methods. The importance of gaze attention – individuals appearing conscious of their environment and of others – is introduced, and a free-of-collision method for crowds is also discussed.

The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London examines the cultural phenomenon of the urban crowd in the context of early modern London's population crisis. The book explores the crowd's double function as a symbol of the city's growth and as the necessary context for the public performance of urban culture. Its central argument is that the figure of the crowd acts as a supplement to the symbolic space of the city, at once providing a tangible referent for urban meaning and threatening the legibility of that meaning through its motive force and uncontrollable energy.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, HBU 2014, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in September 2014. The 9 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: social signals; face and affect; motion analysis; and multiparty interactions.