Unsupervised Bayesian Detection of Independent Motion in Crowds

Abstract

While crowds of various subjects may offer applicationspecific cues to detect individuals, we demonstrate that for the general case, motion itself contains more information than previously exploited. This paper describes an unsupervised data driven Bayesian clustering algorithm which has detection of individual entities as its primary goal. We track simple image features and probabilistically group them into clusters representing independently moving entities. The numbers of clusters and the grouping of constituent features are determined without supervised learning or any subject-specific model. The new approach is instead, that space-time proximity and trajectory coherence through image space are used as the only probabilistic criteria for clustering. An important contribution of this work is how these criteria are used to perform a one-shot data association without iterating through combinatorial hypotheses of cluster assignments. Our proposed general detection algorithm can be augmented with subject-specific filtering, but is shown to already be effective at detecting individual entities in crowds of people, insects, and animals. This paper and the associated video examine the implementation and experiments of our motion clustering framework.