Modelling of interactions for the recognition of activities in groups of people

In this research study we adopt a probabilistic modelling of interactions in groups of people, using video sequences, leading to the recognition of their activities. Firstly, we model short smooth streams of localised movement. Afterwards, we partition the scene in regions of distinct movement, by using maximum a posteriori estimation, by fitting Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) to the movement statistics. Interactions between moving regions are modelled using the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence between pairs of statistical representations of moving regions. Such interactions are considered with respect to the relative movement, moving region location and relative size, as well as to the dynamics of the movement and location inter-dependencies, respectively. The proposed methodology is assessed on two different data sets showing different categories of human interactions and group activities.