Who knows who - Inverting the Social Force Model for finding groups

Social groups based on friendship or family relations are very common phenomena in human crowds and a valuable cue for a crowd activity recognition system. In this paper we present an algorithm for automatic on-line inference of social groups from observed trajectories of individual people. The method is based on the Social Force Model (SFM) - widely used in crowd simulation applications - which specifies several attractive and repulsive forces influencing each individual relative to the other pedestrians and their environment. The main contribution of the paper is an algorithm for inference of the social groups (parameters of the SFM) based on analysis of the observed trajectories through attractive or repulsive forces which could lead to such behaviour. The proposed SFM-based method shows its clear advantage especially in more crowded scenarios where other state-of-the-art methods fail. The applicability of the algorithm is illustrated on an abandoned bag scenario.