A Method of Pedestrian Flow Speed Estimation Adaptive to Viewpoint Changes

This paper proposes a method to estimate the flow speed of pedestrians in surveillance videos. In the proposed method, the average moving speed of pedestrians is measured by estimating the size of real-world motion from the observed motion vectors. For this purpose, a pixel-to-meter conversion factor is introduced which is calculated from camera parameters. Also, the height information, which is missing because of camera projection, is predicted statistically from simulation experiments. Compared to the previous works for flow speed estimation, our method can be applied to various camera views because it separates scene parameters explicitly. Experiments are performed on both simulation image sequences and real video. In the experiments on simulation videos, the proposed method estimated the flow speed with average error of about 0.08m/s. The proposed method also showed promising results for the real video.