Overcrowding in city streets due to certain events or festivals can be dangerous. Prevention and response to this, then, is critical. In this regard, security solutions in the forms of AI and video analytics can be of help.
Overcrowding in city streets due to certain events or festivals can be dangerous, and even deadly, as the tragedy in Itaewon, Seoul, showed. Prevention and response to this, then, is critical. In this regard, security solutions in the forms of AI and video analytics can be of help.
In cities, during certain events or galas, crowds can form. While this can brighten up the festive mood, overcrowding can lead to crowd collapses and crushes that are quite dangerous. Certain recent (and deadly) incidents serve as reminders for this. On New Year’s Day this year, 12 people were dead and 16 injured during a crush at a Hindu shrine in India, triggered by a heavy rush of people coming to celebrate the New Year. In June, at least 8 people were killed while attempting to enter a stadium in Cameroon to watch a 2021 Africa Cup of Nations football match.
Then there’s the tragedy in Itaewon District in Seoul, Korea. On the night of October 29, a crowd crush occurred during Halloween festivities in the neighborhood, resulting in at least 156 people dead and at least 152 others injured. It was the deadliest disaster in South Korea since the sinking of MV Sewol in 2014 and the largest mass casualty event in Seoul since the Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995.
Incidents like these show the danger of overcrowding and highlight the need to include
crowd management and control in any
smart city initiative.
“Overcrowding is a very serious and underestimated danger that we hear a lot about from our customers around the world. Usually it happens when infrastructure isn’t ready to serve more people than expected,” said Yuri Ahmetov, Founder and CEO of vCloud.ai, a cloud-based video surveillance and analytics solutions provider. “Crowd monitoring and control should be a matter of city design and renovation projects.”
Video analytics come to the rescue
Needless to say, doing crowd monitoring manually can be time-consuming and inefficient. Luckily, nowadays,
video analytics solutions are increasingly available for city authorities to rely on. Examples include
people counting, where the camera system counts the number of people entering and exiting a particular place; crowd detection, where the system estimates the number of people within a given area in real time and triggers an alarm when the crowd exceeds the threshold; and heat maps, where real-time imaging tracks movements and assigns colors corresponding to traffic volume to identify where people are gathering.
“Crowd management solutions are becoming available in security surveillance market. Our company provides a variety of instruments that can detect and prevent overcrowding. These are: AI-based crowd detection, traffic monitoring, heat maps, gate and turnstile automation,” Ahmetov said. “These video analytics detectors analyses regular IP camera video streams and detects crowds based on user-defined number of people using neural networks.”
He added: “Currently we deploy such solutions for commercial customers (exhibitions, events, sport venues), though we’ve already conducted tests for Safe City Rome (Italy) so they might incorporate crowd control AI to their city infrastructure in nearest future.”
In terms of architecture, crowd detection analytics can be deployed on the edge or in the cloud, according to the user’s own requirements or scenario. “Depending on the network infrastructure capabilities, these video analytics can be hosted in the cloud or in on-premise GPU servers. Running such analytics on board of camera can be less cost effective. Private cloud solution would be more efficient with these analytics as they do not require high FPS rate,” Ahmetov said.
It should be noted that once overcrowding is detected, the solution must have an alert and report mechanism to ensure response in the quickest time. “Our solution provides instant notification services and situation control tools that allow for immediate response and even workflow automation. In addition it can be integrated upon no-code concept to 3rd party software platforms, Ahmetov added.