A qualitative evaluation of technologies and techniques for data collection on pedestrians and crowded situations

This paper provides an overview and a qualitative evaluation of the available technologies and techniques that can be applied to data collection on crowds. The issue is not trivial, as it doesn't exist an established method or a standard technique, or technology, to collect information on crowds, neither are established the dimensions of crowds that are relevant to gain knowledge about crowd dynamics. Data collection constitutes a critical issue also for pedestrian simulation, especially for the validation phase of simulation cycle. Introduction briefly resumes the main theories on crowds and introduces the kinds of quantities that can be measured in a crowd. Section 2. proposes a classification of the technologies that can be applied to crowd data collection while in Section 3. some data collection methods are exposed in details and a suggestion of some scenarios of application is provided. Section 4. will briefly describe a possible scenario of data collection, a stadium. In Section 5. a specific evaluation criteria is established and a qualitative evaluation of localization technologies is presented. Conclusions end the paper.