Pedestrian Spatial Self-organization According to its Nearest Neighbor Position

The paper describes relation between positions of individuals in a crowd, namely dependence between position of a pedestrian and position of his/her nearest neighbors. Two main characteristics have been analyzed: nth nearest neighbors’ spatial and angular distributions. At first sight, people in human crowd seem to be located randomly, however, our findings indicate that there are clearly visible patterns in analyzed characteristics. We discover symptoms of strong correlations between position of closely located pedestrians. Simple, local movement rules for pedestrian are proposed to explain observed patterns.