Deep convolutional neural network-based enhanced crowd density monitoring for intelligent urban planning on smart cities

The concept of a smart city has spread as a solution ensuring wider availability of data and services to citizens, apart from as a means to lower the environmental footprint of cities. Crowd density monitoring is a cutting-edge technology that enables smart cities to monitor and effectively manage crowd movements in real time. By utilizing advanced artificial intelligence and video analytics, valuable insights are accumulated from crowd behaviour, assisting cities in improving operational efficiency, improving public safety, and urban planning. This technology also significantly contributes to resource allocation and emergency response, contributing to smarter, safer urban environments. Crowd density classification in smart cities using deep learning (DL) employs cutting-edge NN models to interpret and analyze information from sensors such as IoT devices and CCTV cameras. This technique trains DL models on large datasets to accurately count people in a region, assisting traffic management, safety, and urban planning. By utilizing recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for time-series data and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image processing, the model adapts to varying crowd scenarios, lighting, and angles. This manuscript presents a Deep Convolutional Neural Network-based Crowd Density Monitoring for Intelligent Urban Planning (DCNNCDM-IUP) technique on smart cities. The proposed DCNNCDM-IUP technique utilizes DL methods to detect crowd densities, which can significantly assist in urban planning for smart cities. Initially, the DCNNCDM-IUP technique performs image preprocessing using Gaussian filtering (GF). The DCNNCDM-IUP technique utilizes the SE-DenseNet approach, which effectually learns complex feature patterns for feature extraction. Moreover, the hyperparameter selection of the SE-DenseNet approach is accomplished by using the red fox optimization (RFO) methodology. Finally, the convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) methodology recognizes varied crowd densities. A comprehensive simulation analysis is conducted to demonstrate the improved performance of the DCNNCDM-IUP technique. The experimental validation of the DCNNCDM-IUP technique portrayed a superior accuracy value of 98.40% compared to existing DL models.