Unsupervised Motion Pattern Mining for Crowded Scenes Analysis

Crowded scenes analysis is a challenging topic in computer vision field. How to detect diverse motion patterns in crowded scenarios from videos is the critical yet hard part of this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to mining motion patterns by utilizing motion information during both long-term period and short interval simultaneously. To capture long-term motions effectively, we introduce Motion History Image (MHI) representation to access to the global perspective about the crowd motion. The combination of MHI and optical flow, which is used to get instant motion information, gives rise to discriminative spatial-temporal motion features. Benefitting from the robustness and efficiency of the novel motion representation, the following motion pattern mining is implemented in a completely unsupervised way. The motion vectors are clustered hierarchically through automatic hierarchical clustering algorithm building on the basis of graphic model. This method overcomes the instability of optical flow in dealing with time continuity in crowded scenes. The results of clustering reveal the situations of motion pattern distribution in current crowded videos. To validate the performance of the proposed approach, we conduct experimental evaluations on some challenging videos including vehicles and pedestrians. The reliable detection results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.