A Hybrid Tracking System of Full-Body Motion Inside Crowds

For our understanding of the dynamics inside crowds, reliable empirical data are needed, which could enable increases in safety and comfort for pedestrians and the design of models reflecting the real dynamics. A well-calibrated camera system can extract absolute head position with high accuracy. The inclusion of inertial sensors or even self-contained full-body motion capturing systems allows the relative tracking of invisible people or body parts or capturing the locomotion of the whole body even in dense crowds. The newly introduced hybrid system maps the trajectory of the top of the head coming from a full-body motion tracking system to the head trajectory of a camera system in global space. The fused data enable the analysis of possible correlations of all observables. In this paper we present an experiment of people passing though a bottleneck and show by example the influences of bottleneck width and motivation on the overall movement, velocity, stepping locomotion and rotation of the pelvis. The hybrid tracking system opens up new possibilities for analyzing pedestrian dynamics inside crowds, such as the space requirement while passing through a bottleneck. The system allows linking any body motion to characteristics describing the situation of a person inside a crowd, such as the density or movements of other participants nearby.