Modeling crowd emotion from emergent event video

AbstractIn emergency situation, mass panic often causes more causalities than the disaster itself. The crowd emotional model could be used to simulate how crowd behavior in emergency scenarios and be helpful for developing crowd evacuation plans in emergency situations. However, existing crowd emotional models usually set model parameters in an empirical manner and are not validated by real cases. In this paper, a crowd emotional model is proposed to simulate the crowd movement in outdoor emergency situations. First of all, the crowd entropy and the movement difference are proposed to describe the emotional impact of the crowd scene on the agents. The perception of vision and hearing are considered, and the calculation formulas of the agent's emotional intensity and crowd emotional contagion are proposed. By calculating individual trajectories in the real video, the cumulative differences between the movements of the real crowd and the corresponding virtual crowd are analyzed. At last, a multi‐parameter optimization method is implemented by the differential evolution algorithm. To verify the parameters in models, three videos which are generated from three real cases, including explosion attack, shooting incident, and crowd disturbance are selected for experimental verification. The results showed that the proposed model could be a feasible method for optimizing parameters to simulate the emergency scenario.