Dense Crowd Dynamics and Pedestrian Trajectories: A Multiscale Field Dataset from the Festival of Lights in Lyon

The dynamics of dense crowds have received considerable attention from researchers seeking fundamental understanding or aiming to develop data-driven algorithms to predict pedestrian trajectories. However, current research mainly relies on data collected in controlled settings. We present one of the first comprehensive field datasets describing dense pedestrian dynamics at different scales, from contextualized macroscopic crowd flows over hundreds of meters to microscopic trajectories (around 7000 individual trajectories). In addition, a sample of GPS traces, some statistics of contacts and pushes, and a list of non-standard crowd phenomena observed in the video recordings are provided. The data were collected during the 2022 Festival of Lights in Lyon, France, as part of the French-German MADRAS project and cover densities up to 4 pedestrians per square meter. We suggest using this extensive dataset, acquired in complex real-world settings, to benchmark models of pedestrian dynamics.