Crowd emotion detection using dynamic probabilistic models

Detecting emotions of a crowd to control the situation is an area of emerging interest. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel idea to detect the emotions of the crowd. Emotions are defined as evolving quantities arising from the reaction to contextual situations in a set of dynamic pattern of events. These events depend on internal and external interaction states in an already mapped space. The emotions of multiple people constituting a crowd in any surveillance environment are estimated by their social and collective behaviors using sensor signals e.g., a camera, which captures and tracks their motion. The feature space is constructed based on local features to model the contextual situations and the different interactions corresponding to different emergent behaviors are modeled using bio-inspired dynamic model. The changes in emotions correspond to behavioral changes which are produced to regulate behaviors under different encountered situations. Proposed algorithm involves the probabilistic signal processing modelling techniques for analysis of different types of collective behaviors based on interactions among people and classification models to estimate emotions as positive or negative. The evaluations are performed on simulated data show the proposed algorithm effectively recognizes the emotions of the crowd under specific situations. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.