Simulating heterogeneous crowds from a physiological perspective

Most of the existing approaches to simulate heterogeneous crowd behaviors focus on the aspect of psychology. From a human׳s physiological characteristics perspective, this paper presents a method to generate heterogeneous crowd behaviors. We choose four basic physiological characteristics, including gender, age, health and body shape, and map them to a navigation method, which is reciprocal velocity obstacle approach in the paper. The mapping parameters are determined through a two-step process. Firstly, a video based method is proposed to obtain simulation parameters for single physiological feature by tracking and analyzing trajectories of persons in real video scenes, and then a comprehensive mapping is presented to combine all characteristics together to generate parameters for a certain person. Through a number of simulations and validation experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is simple but effective and efficient to exhibit heterogeneous behaviors of crowds.