A survey on Crowd Behavior Analysis through indoor localization

Due to rapid urbanization especially in developing countries, facilities are more concentrated around the cities. This is making the cities more crowded than ever before thus, requiring improved mechanisms for managing crowded areas. Crowd behavior and management deals with behavior analysis, surveillance, passenger safety, and navigation services. Interestingly, most crowd management approaches are designed for outdoor spaces based on GPS signals. However, the problem of indoor crowd management is more pertinent in cities, especially in airports, railway stations, shopping malls, public hospitals, and so on. Thus, a blend of indoor and outdoor sensing modalities should be incorporated for the effective study of crowd behavior. This survey provides a comprehensive view of this topic along with a brief description of the indoor sensing modalities that could be incorporated. Both the concepts of infrastructure sensing (such as Wi-Fi) and infrastructure-less sensing (such as inertial sensors) are covered. A comparative analysis of the existing works has been presented along with the pertinent research challenges of crowd behavior analysis. Open research issues are also highlighted that could be explored further for interested readers.