A social force evacuation model driven by video data

This paper proposes a video data-driven social force model for simulating crowd evacuation. The initialization of pedestrian position, path navigation, and goal selection in the improved social force model was guided by real video data. To initialize pedestrian position and determine path navigation, the distribution of the pedestrians is set according to the real video. We also extracted the trajectories of pedestrian movement from the videos, and these trajectories were stored into a path set to guide the evacuation of pedestrians. Moreover, a fitness function was defined to model the behavior of a pedestrian goal selection. The fitness function could process the evacuation parameters, which were extracted from the video, and consider the degree and distance of exit congestion. Furthermore, we quantified the relationship values among pedestrians, and a new force called “group force” was added to the primary social force model. Pedestrians with close relationship gathered into one group and walked together. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the video data-driven model was applied to simulate campus halls and roads. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is consistent with real-world situations and can assist in analyzing emergency evacuation scenarios.