Soraia Raupp Musse – författare

Research into the methods and techniques used in simulating crowds has developed extensively within the last few years, particularly in the areas of video games and film. Despite recent impressive results when simulating and rendering thousands of individuals, many challenges still exist in this area.

The comparison of simulation with reality, the realistic appearance of virtual humans and their behavior, group structure and their motion, and collision avoidance are just some examples of these challenges. For most of the applications of crowds, it is now a requirement to have real-time simulations – which is an additional challenge, particularly when crowds are very large.

Crowd Simulation analyses these challenges in depth and suggests many possible solutions. Daniel Thalmann and Soraia Musse share their experiences and expertise in the application of:

·         Population modeling

·         Virtual human animation

·         Behavioral models for crowds

·         The connection between virtual and real crowds

·         Path planning and navigation

·         Visual attention models

·         Geometric and populated semantic environments

·         Crowd rendering

The second edition presents techniques and methods developed since the authors first covered the simulation of crowds in 2007. Crowd Simulation includes in-depth discussions on the techniques of path planning, including a new hybrid approach between navigation graphs and potential-based methods. The importance of gaze attention – individuals appearing conscious of their environment and of others – is introduced, and a free-of-collision method for crowds is also discussed.

Recent times have seen growing interest in crowd simulation, particularly in the commercial sector where it is used in the fields of security, defence, entertainment and the movie industry. This book focuses closely on methods and techniques for crowd simulation, filling the gap in the professional literature.

The topics covered in this comprehensive survey include Modelling of Populations; Virtual Human Animation; Behavioural Animation of Crowds; Crowd Rendering and Populated Environments.

This practically-focused book presents a computational model for detection and analysis of pedestrian features in crowds from video sequences.

The study of human behavior is a subject of great scientific interest and probably an inexhaustible source of research. The analysis of pedestrians and groups in crowds is relevant in several areas of application, such as security, entertainment, environmental and public spaces planning and social sciences. Cultural and personality aspects are attributes that can influence personal behavior and affect the group in which individuals belong.

In this sense, we consider different ways of characterizing individuals and groups in crowds with respect to their relationship with the geometrical space and time. We discuss and describe an approach to extract and analyse, from the Computer Science point of view, emotions, personalities and cultural aspects from crowds and groups of pedestrians, using Computer Vision techniques.

Extracting characteristics from real pedestrians and crowds, benefits other areas, such as: architecture and design (planning spaces to maximize pedestrian and group-environment fit); security and surveillance (design of evacuation plans considering characteristics of the crowds and detection of abnormal events); entertainment (more realistic crowds in movies and games reproducing characteristics from real pedestrians and crowds); social sciences (understanding of human behavior), among others.

A big challenge in this area of research is the comparison with real life data. In this book, we successfully compared the results of the proposed approach with Psychology literature, where several studies aimed to analysis human behavior.