An analysis of manoeuvring in dense crowds

Abstract

In high-density crowds, one can observe torso twists; people rotate their upper body to decrease their width perpendicular to the motion path, in order to squeeze through narrow spaces between other crowd members. In this paper we investigate such behaviour, by recording and analysing dense crowds. Apart from the common approach, where only the position of each person in the crowd is recorded, we also record and analyse the torso orientations. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been done before in the context of dense crowds. We show that the paths chosen by the participants can be predicted by Generalized Voronoi Diagrams based on line segment representations of the participants' torsos, and attest that the medial axis of a capsule-shaped representation of the torso is a good choice for such line segments.