Simulation of Evacuating Crowd Based on Deep Learning and Social Force Model

It is always difficult to evacuate crowds in public places like subway stations. The traditional crowd behavior simulation models often ignore two important issues in crowd evacuation: pedestrian tracking and individual differences. To solve the problem, this paper combines social force model (SFM) with deep learning into a novel pedestrian detection method. Firstly, several deep learning algorithms for pedestrian detection were compared, and the best ones for sparse and dense crowds were determined. Next, the pedestrian positions in a real video were acquired by the selected algorithms, and converted into actual coordinates in the scene. Then, the evacuation process was simulated with our method and the SFM based on these coordinates. The results show that our model output closer-to-reality results than the SFM. The research findings shed important new light on evacuation in crowded areas.