Collective behavior recognition using compact descriptors

Abstract: This paper presents a novel hierarchical approach for collective behavior recognition based solely on ground-plane trajectories. In the first layer of our classifier, we introduce a novel feature called Personal Interaction Descriptor (PID), which combines the spatial distribution of a pair of pedestrians within a temporal window with a pyramidal representation of the relative speed to detect pairwise interactions. These interactions are then combined with higher level features related to the mean speed and shape formed by the pedestrians in the scene, generating a Collective Behavior Descriptor (CBD) that is used to identify collective behaviors in a second stage. In both layers, Random Forests were used as classifiers, since they allow features of different natures to be combined seamlessly. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves results on par with state of the art techniques with a better balance of class errors. Moreover, we show that our method can generalize well across different camera setups through cross-dataset experiments.