Hajj Crowd Management Using CNN-Based Approach

Hajj as the Muslim holy pilgrimage,attracts millions of humans to Mecca every year.According to statists,the pilgrimage has attracted close to 2.5 million pilgrims in 2019,and at its peak,it has attracted over 3 million pilgrims in 2012.It is considered as the world’s largest human gathering.Safety makes one of the main concerns with regards to managing the large crowds and ensuring that stampedes and other similar overcrowding accidents are avoided.This paper presents a crowd management system using image classification and an alarm system for managing the millions of crowds during Hajj.The image classification system greatly relies on the appropriate dataset used to train the Convolutional neural network(CNN),which is the deep learning technique that has recently attracted the interest of the research community and industry in varying applications of image classification and speech recognition.The core building block of CNN is is a convolutional layer obtained by the getting CNN trained with patches bearing designated features of the trainee mages.The algorithm is implemented,using the Conv2D layers to activate the CNN as a sequential network.Thus,creating a 2D convolution layer having 64 filters and drop out of 0.5 makes the core of a CNN referred to as a set of KERNELS.The aim is to train the CNN model with mapped image data,and to make it available for use in classifying the crowd as heavily-crowded,crowded,semi-crowded,light crowded,and normal.The utility of these results lies in producing appropriate signals for proving helpful in monitoring the pilgrims.Counting pilgrims from the photos will help the authorities to determine the number of people in certain areas.The results demonstrate the utility of agent-based modeling for Hajj pilgrims.

Toward Optimal Periodic Crowd Tracking via Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Crowd management and analysis(CMA)systems have gained a lot of interest in the vulgarization of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)use.Crowd tracking using UAVs is among the most important services provided by a CMA.In this paper,we studied the periodic crowd-tracking(PCT)problem.It consists in usingUAVs to follow-up crowds,during the life-cycle of an open crowded area(OCA).Two criteria were considered for this purpose.The first is related to the CMA initial investment,while the second is to guarantee the quality of service(QoS).The existing works focus on very specified assumptions that are highly committed to CMAs applications context.This study outlined a new binary linear programming(BLP)model to optimally solve the PCT motivated by a real-world application study taking into consideration the high level of abstraction.To closely approach different real-world contexts,we carefully defined and investigated a set of parameters related to the OCA characteristics,behaviors,and theCMAinitial infrastructure investment(e.g.,UAVs,charging stations(CSs)).In order to periodically update theUAVs/crowds andUAVs/CSs assignments,the proposed BLP was integrated into a linear algorithm called PCTs solver.Our main objective was to study the PCT problem fromboth theoretical and numerical viewpoints.To prove the PCTs solver effectiveness,we generated a diversified set of PCTs instances with different scenarios for simulation purposes.The empirical results analysis enabled us to validate the BLPmodel and the PCTs solver,and to point out a set of new challenges for future research directions.

Sparrow Search Optimization with Transfer Learning-Based Crowd Density Classification

Due to the rapid increase in urbanization and population,crowd gatherings are frequently observed in the form of concerts,political,and religious meetings.HAJJ is one of the well-known crowding events that takes place every year in Makkah,Saudi Arabia.Crowd density estimation and crowd monitoring are significant research areas in Artificial Intelligence(AI)applications.The current research study develops a new Sparrow Search Optimization with Deep Transfer Learning based Crowd Density Detection and Classification(SSODTL-CD2C)model.The presented SSODTL-CD2C technique majorly focuses on the identification and classification of crowd densities.To attain this,SSODTL-CD2C technique exploits Oppositional Salp Swarm Optimization Algorithm(OSSA)with EfficientNet model to derive the feature vectors.At the same time,Stacked Sparse Auto Encoder(SSAE)model is utilized for the classification of crowd densities.Finally,SSO algorithm is employed for optimal fine-tuning of the parameters involved in SSAE mechanism.The performance of the proposed SSODTL-CD2C technique was validated using a dataset with four different kinds of crowd densities.The obtained results demonstrated that the proposed SSODTLCD2C methodology accomplished an excellent crowd classification performance with a maximum accuracy of 93.25%.So,the proposed method will be highly helpful in managing HAJJ and other crowded events.

Identification of Anomalous Behavioral Patterns in Crowd Scenes

Real time crowd anomaly detection and analyses has become an active and challenging area of research in computer vision since the last decade.The emerging need of crowd management and crowd monitoring for public safety has widen the countless paths of deep learning methodologies and architectures.Although,researchers have developed many sophisticated algorithms but still it is a challenging and tedious task to manage and monitor crowd in real time.The proposed research work focuses on detection of local and global anomaly detection of crowd.Fusion of spatial-temporal features assist in differentiation of feature trained using Mask R-CNN with Resnet101 as a backbone architecture for feature extraction.The data from,BIWI Walking Pedestrian dataset and the Crowds-By-Examples(CBE)dataset and Self-Generated dataset has been used for experimentation.The data deals with different situations like one set of data deals with normal situations like people walking and acting individually,in a group or in a dense crowd.The other set of data contains images four unique anomalies like fight,accident,explosion and people behaving normally.The simulated results show that in terms of precision and recall,our system performs well with Self-Generated dataset.Moreover,our system uses an early stopping mechanism,which allows our system to outperform to make our model efficient.That is why,on 89th epoch our system starts generating finest results.

Sparse Crowd Flow Analysis of Tawaaf of Kaaba During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the entire world and has put forth high demand for techniques that remotely manage crowd-related tasks.Video surveillance and crowd management using video analysis techniques have significantly impacted today’s research,and numerous applications have been developed in this domain.This research proposed an anomaly detection technique applied to Umrah videos in Kaaba during the COVID-19 pandemic through sparse crowd analysis.Managing theKaaba rituals is crucial since the crowd gathers from around the world and requires proper analysis during these days of the pandemic.The Umrah videos are analyzed,and a system is devised that can track and monitor the crowd flow in Kaaba.The crowd in these videos is sparse due to the pandemic,and we have developed a technique to track the maximum crowd flow and detect any object(person)moving in the direction unlikely of the major flow.We have detected abnormal movement by creating the histograms for the vertical and horizontal flows and applying thresholds to identify the non-majority flow.Our algorithm aims to analyze the crowd through video surveillance and timely detect any abnormal activity tomaintain a smooth crowd flowinKaaba during the pandemic.

A Novel Cultural Crowd Model Toward Cognitive Artificial Intelligence

Existing literature shows cultural crowd management has unforeseen issues due to four dynamic elements;time,capacity,speed,and culture.Crosscultural variations are increasing the complexity level because each mass and event have different characteristics and challenges.However,no prior study has employed the six Hofstede Cultural Dimensions(HCD)for predicting crowd behaviors.This study aims to develop the Cultural Crowd-Artificial Neural Network(CC-ANN)learning model that considers crowd’s HCD to predict their physical(distance and speed)and social(collectivity and cohesion)characteristics.The model was developed towards a cognitive intelligent decision support tool where the predicted characteristics affect the estimated regulation plan’s time and capacity.We designed the experiments as four groups to analyze the proposed model’s outcomes and extract the interrelations between the HCD of crowd’s grouped individuals and their physical and social characteristics.Furthermore,the extracted interrelations were verified with the dataset’s statistical correlation analysis with a P-value<0.05.Results demonstrate that the predicted crowd’s characteristics were positively/negatively affected by their considered cultural features.Similarly,analyzing outcomes identified the most influential HCD for predicting crowd behavior.The results also show that the CC-ANN model improves the prediction and learning performance for the crowd behavior because the achieved accepted level of accuracy does not exceed 10 to 20 epochs in most cases.Moreover,the performance improved by 90%,93%respectively in some cases.Finally,all prediction best cases were related to one or more cultural features with a low error of 0.048,0.117,0.010,and 0.014 mean squared error,indicating a novel cultural learning model.

Numerical Simulation of the Flow of Crowds at the Jamarat Bridge during the Annual Hajj Event

The huge number of pilgrims to the holy Mecca in the Hajj needs high awareness of crowd safety management. The stoning of the Jamarat, which is one of the rituals of the Hajj, undergoes the most dangerous crowd movements where fatal accidents occurred. This work investigates some problems related with the crowd dynamics when stoning the Jamarat pillars and gives some solutions. The main idea of this research is to suppose that the crowd dynamics is assimilated to fluid movement under certain conditions. Numerical simulation using a computational fluid dynamics program is used to solve Navier-Stokes equations governing the mechanics of homogeneous and incompressible fluid in a domain similar to the Jamarat Bridge from the entrance to the middle Jamarah. Some solutions are proposed inspired by the flow solutions to better manage crowd movements in the Jamarat Bridge and eventually in other similar dynamics events like sporting events.

Tracking and Analysis of Pedestrian’s Behavior in Public Places

Crowd management becomes a global concern due to increased population in urban areas.Better management of pedestrians leads to improved use of public places.Behavior of pedestrian’s is a major factor of crowd management in public places.There are multiple applications available in this area but the challenge is open due to complexity of crowd and depends on the environment.In this paper,we have proposed a new method for pedestrian’s behavior detection.Kalman filter has been used to detect pedestrian’s usingmovement based approach.Next,we have performed occlusion detection and removal using region shrinking method to isolate occluded humans.Human verification is performed on each human silhouette and wavelet analysis and particle gradient motion are extracted for each silhouettes.Gray Wolf Optimizer(GWO)has been utilized to optimize feature set and then behavior classification has been performed using the Extreme Gradient(XG)Boost classifier.Performance has been evaluated using pedestrian’s data from avenue and UBI-Fight datasets,where both have different environment.The mean achieved accuracies are 91.3%and 85.14%over the Avenue and UBI-Fight datasets,respectively.These results are more accurate as compared to other existing methods.

Quantifying out-of-station waiting time in oversaturated urban metro systems

Metro systems in megacities such as Beijing,Shenzhen,and Guangzhou are under great passenger demand pressure.During peak hours,it is common to see oversaturated conditions(i.e.,passenger demand exceeds network capacity)and a popular control intervention is to restrict the entering rate by setting up out-of-station queueing with crowd control barriers.The out-of-station waiting can make up a substantial proportion of total travel time but is often ignored in the literature.Quantifying out-of-station waiting is important to evaluating the social benefit and cost of metro services;however,out-of-station waiting is difficult to estimate because it leaves no trace in smart card transactions of metros.In this study,we estimate the out-of-station waiting time by leveraging the information from a small group of transfer passengers—those who transfer from nearby bus routes to the metro station.Based on the transfer interval of this small group,we infer the out-of-station waiting time for all passengers by a Gaussian Process regression and then use the estimated out-of-station waiting time to build queueing diagrams.We apply our method to the Tiantongyuan North station of Beijing metro;results show that the maximum out-of-station waiting time can reach 15 min,and the maximum queue length can be over 3000 passengers.We find out-of-station waiting can cause significant travel costs and thus should be considered in analyzing transit performance,mode choice,and social benefits.To the best of our knowledge,this paper is the first quantitative study for out-of-station waiting time.