VISUALIZING PASSENGER FLOW IN RAILWAY STATION USING LASER SCANNERS

Katsuyuki NAKAMURA Doctoral Student Center for Spatial Information Science The University of Tokyo 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo JAPAN Tel: +81-3-5452-6417 Fax: +81-3-5452-6414 E-mail: katsu@iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Huijing ZHAO Visiting Associate Professor Center for Spatial Information Science The University of Tokyo 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo JAPAN Tel: +81-3-5452-6417 Fax: +81-3-5452-6414 E-mail: chou@skl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp Kiyoshi SAKAMOTO Researcher Research and Development Center of JR East Group East Japan Railway Company 2-0, Nisshin-cyo, Kita-ku, Saitama-shi, Saitama, JAPAN Tel: +81-48-651-2552 Fax: +81-48-651-2571 E-mail: k-sakamoto@jreast.co.jp

Ryosuke SHIBASAKI Professor Center for Spatial Information Science The University of Tokyo 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo JAPAN Tel: +81-3-5452-6417 Fax: +81-3-5452-6414 E-mail: shiba@skl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Naoki SUZUKAWA Researcher JR East Consultants Company 2-1-1 16F, Yoyogi, Meguro-ku, Tokyo JAPAN Tel: +81-3-3373-6007 Fax: +81-3-3373-6446 E-mail: suzukawanaoki@jrc.jregroup.ne.jp

Abstract: Our goal in this study is to examine the feasibility for analyzing and visualizing passenger flows using laser scanners in a railway station. A network of laser scanners is located on different places and scan pedestrian's feet at a horizontal plane about 16 cm above the ground. Motion trajectories are extracted from the laser points on moving feet. They are analyzed to find the pattern of passenger flows and its change with time. Through three experiments in railway stations, we concluded that the proposed method is efficient in examining user behaviour even in the crowded stations. Keywords: Behaviour study, Railway station, Passenger flow, Laser scanner Paper 220

VISUALIZING PASSENGER FLOW IN RAILWAY STATION USING LASER SCANNERS 1 INTRODUCTION

Human behaviour in a railway station, an airport or a shopping mall has been investigated in various fields such as architectural design, marketing, security and so on, where moving trajectories, walking speeds and retention patterns are the basic data for such an analysis. For that purpose, it is firstly needed to track multiple people in a wide and a crowded environment. Although various tracking methods are proposed for decades, only few methods have been applied to real scenes due to several constraints. A large body of work for tracking people exists in the field of computer vision, and they commonly use a video camera. In the case of computation from a video camera, mean-shift (Dorin et al., 2003) and condensation (Michael and Andrew, 1998) algorithms are especially gaining attention for effective people tracking. However, both methods are relatively weak for multiple people tracking in the above environments. In addition, utilizing multiple cameras to cover a wide area is practically difficult for real scene because of a high computational cost and a complicated calibration. A different class of approaches for tracking people refers to the data provided by range sensors instead of video images (e.g. Prassler et al., 1999; Ajo et al., 2002). In these approaches, obtained range data are segmented to recognize and track multiple people. Nevertheless, the difficulty in this method is also occlusion robustness as well. Accordingly, existing methods are hard to apply to the crowded station targeted in this study (see Figure 1.). Actually, surveybased activity analysis depends on the manual works such as visual observation from video cameras. Simulation-based activity analysis is as for the rest.

Figure 1. A snapshot of a crowded railway station during rush hour.

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On the other hand, a novel system has been developed in authors previous research (Zhao and Shibasaki, 2005), where a network of single-row laser scanners is used to track the moving feet of pedestrians in a wide and open area. Its efficiency in tracking a large and dense crowd in an environment such as a railway station has been demonstrated through real experiments (Nakamura et al., 2005). In this research, we study the walking trajectories that are measured using the above system. Our target is to find whether the method is possible in grasping the pattern of user behaviour and the behavioural change with time as well as with architectural modification in a wide and crowded environment such as a railway station. In the followings, we first briefly describe the laser scanner system to measure walking trajectories. A number of analysis and experimental results are presented subsequently. 2 LASER-BASED PEOPLE TRACKING

Our tracking method has been described in the previous work (Zhao and Shibasaki, 2005) and is summarized here. Unlike existing methods (Prassler et al., 1999; Ajo et al., 2002), we set multiple laser scanners (SICK-LMS200) on the floor doing horizontal scanning to detect walking rhythm of people. Range scans from different sensors are transformed into a common coordinate system by using Hermart Transformation that deals with a shift and a rotation. Tracking algorithm consists of following components. 1) Foot detection by clustering range data. 2) Pedestrian detection by grouping feet data. 3) Motion detection by tracing pedestrian data. 4) Trajectory tracing by utilizing Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The output from laser tracker is a sequence of x,y positions for each tracked people. A sample of tracking result is shown in Figure 2. Coloured lines are people trajectories obtained by the tracker. In this figure, the trajectories are overlapped into a video image by conducting a geometric and a temporal registration. Video images dont be used in the tracking process, in this case. As a result of the accuracy assessment, the laser tracker can track 80% passengers in the station in Tokyo during rush hours (Nakamura et al., 2005).

(a) Tracking result in the mid density

(b) Tracking result in the high density

Figure 2. Overlapped results of the video image, laser points and trajectories. Paper 220

PASSENGER FLOW ANALYSIS

Next we have to consider what kind of analysis is effective for grasping passenger flow in a railway station. The most basic parameter that depicts spatial characteristics is a velocity distribution in a concourse. However, we found that the local velocity of passengers in our environment did not very much while walking because of the instability of the sampling frequency. This is consistent with the observation made in the existing works (Cielniak et al., 2003; Anand et al., 2004). We have to devise a countermeasure for such phenomenon. In addition, it is also effective to visualize a flow line and stationary passengers in a concourse. In this paper, we detect stationary people and collision avoidance behaviour for passenger flow analysis, and visualize these spatial distributions with oriented flow lines. 3.1 Detecting Stationary Passengers Stationary people in a concourse are detected on the basis of the trajectory segmentation (Anand et al., 2004). Let (xt,yt),t=0,1,,n be a sequence of positions obtained from the tracker. The corresponding displacements are (rt, t ),t=0,1,,n- t , where

rt = ( xt +t xt ) 2 + ( yt +t yt ) 2 , t > 0

(1) (2)

t = tan 1

y t + t y t ,t > 0 x t + t x t

If rt 0.5 m, then they are assumed as the stationary passengers, otherwise, they are assumed as walking passengers. In this study, we set t as 30 frames (approximately two seconds, in our environment) for convenience. In addition, we discretize as N-dimensional relaxation based on t for effective visualization that can be roughly grasped walking directions. We found that it is convenient that N = 2 for visualizing the oriented flow lines, and we apply this parameter in this paper. 3.2 Detecting Collision Avoidance Behaviour Activity recognition system is gaining attention in computer vision research community due to many applications such as security, human-computer interaction (Somboon et al., 2000). Obviously, such system is useful for spatial planning in a railway station. For instance, if this system can detect passengers who act a particular type of actions such as passing through, approaching, following, avoiding, it can be substitute as an amenity indicator in a railway station. In this paper, we firstly try to detect collision avoidance toward the goal of realizing a generic recognition system of a human activity. The simple algorithm for detecting collision avoidance is described as follows. 1) Calculate a crossed axes angle of directional vectors between pedestrian j and k. 2) Calculate relative direction d between pedestrian j and k at the above time.

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3) If (150 210) (d 0.5 m) , then they are assumed as doing collision avoidance behaviour. A concept of detecting collision avoidance is shown in Figure 3. In our environment, obtained trajectories have much noise due to a sensors performance and an algorithms property. Therefore, we apply the median filter and the moving average filter to reduce such noise for convenience.
j distance k

crossed axes angle

Figure 3. A concept of detecting collision avoidance Note that above algorithm and these parameters are not necessarily appropriate for detecting actual avoidance behaviour. We have to examine a more generic and effective method for the future. 4 EXPERIMENTAL RESULT

Our method was tested in the concourse in three railway stations. Each station has wide concourse and enough passengers for validating the feasibility toward the crowded environment. Visualization results are shown in this section. 4.1 Experiment 1: station-E The first experiment is conducted in the E railway station in Tokyo, which is used by over 250,000 passengers a day. Eight LMS-200 (by SICK) were applied to cover a floor area of about 30 m x 20 m. Figure 4 shows sensor alignment in the concourse. Shadow area represents a measurement area, which dark colour means the area measured by much more laser scans. More than 150 passengers occupy the concourse during the rush hour. Figure 1 shows a snapshot captured from the arrow in Figure 4. Accumulated trajectories in the concourse were shown in Figure 5. Each figure is visualized by accumulating the trajectory data during a minute. Yellow lines represent passengers moving to rightward, blue lines represents passengers moving to leftward. Red and white dots show stationary passengers and collision avoidances respectively. Brighter regions are the area that is passed by many passengers, i.e. high dense area. The tendency of passenger flows can be clearly grasped in a day using our method. An occurrence of detected retentions and collision avoidances is seemed to have certain characteristics. Furthermore, there are more collision avoidances during the rush hour (8:30 am and 5:30 pm).

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Figure 4. A sensor alignment in the concourse of E railway station.

Figure 5. Accumulated Trajectories in the concourse of the E railway station during a minute, where a) blue lines: passengers moving to leftward, b) yellow lines: passengers moving to rightward, c) red dots: stationary passengers, d) white dots: collision avoidance.

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4.2 Experiment 2: station-SM Second experiment is conducted in the SM railway station in Tokyo. Eight laser scanners (SICK LMS-200) and a video camera. Figure 6 shows sensors alignment in the concourse. Measurement area has a dimension of 30 m x 20 m approximately. In this station, the guidance information board (simplified LED in the followings) is modified for the purpose of providing more understandable and clear information for the passengers. A snapshot of LED is shown in Figure 7 with before and after refurbishment. According to this modification, it is expected that passengers can check the information and move more smoothly without any delay. In order to investigate the effect of the refurbishment for the passenger flow, we measured twice around the time of a refurbishment. The result of investigating the behavioural change is described in Section 5.

Figure 6. A sensor alignment on the SM railway station.

(a) Before refurbishment

(b) After refurbishment

Figure 7. A snapshot of the guidance information board.

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At first, accumulated trajectories in the concourse before refurbishment are shown in Figure 8. Each figure is visualized by accumulating the data during a minute. Legends are same as the experiment one (colour, symbols etc.). Our system could not track all of the passengers during rush hours. In coloured circle, most trajectories are disappeared due to an occlusion (see the cover area in Figure 6 as well.). In order to avoid such phenomenon, it should be set more laser scanners where user wants to measure.

Figure 8. Accumulated Trajectories in the concourse of the SM railway station during a minute, where a) blue lines: passengers moving to leftward, b) yellow lines: passengers moving to rightward, c) red dots: stationary passengers, d) white dots: collision avoidance.

4.3 Experiment 3: station-SS Third experiment is conducted in the SS railway station in Tokyo. The number of employed sensors is same as the experiment two. A sensor alignment and a snapshot of the LED in the SS railway station are shown in Figure 9 and 10 respectively. Accumulated Trajectories in the concourse were shown in Figure 11. Each figure is visualized by accumulating the trajectory data during a minute. In this experiments, most trajectories are obtained using our system because there is a moderate number of passengers compared to the experiment two.

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Figure 9. A sensor alignment on the SS railway station.

(a) Before refurbishment

(b) After refurbishment

Figure 10. A snapshot of guidance information board.

Figure 11 Accumulated Trajectories in the concourse in SS railway station during a minute, where a) blue lines: passengers moving to leftward, b) yellow lines: passengers moving to rightward, c) red dots: stationary passengers, d) white dots: collision avoidance. Paper 220

BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE WITH ARCHITECTURAL MODIFICATION

In order to examine the behavioural change of passengers with LED modification, we focus on passengers who check LED (see Figure 12.). Such passengers are automatically detected using the following rules. 1) Pick up all stationary trajectories around LED. 2) Remove objects who stay over certain time (30 seconds, in this study) from all stationary trajectories. 3) Remove objects whose directions are out of the entrance gate. In the step 1), we exclude the data of stationary passengers detected in the morning and the evening that are relatively noisy because they have time of congestions and processions. In the step 2), we exclude passengers who are likely to wait for any people.

Figure 12. A snapshot of passengers who check the guidance information. Kernel density estimation (e.g. Chris, 1995) is applied to visualize a spatial pattern of detected objects of stationary passengers. Given a set {x i }i =1...n of n points in the two dimensional space, the multivariate kernel density estimation with kernel K (x) and window radius (band width) h, computed in the point x is given by
f (x) = 1 n x xi . K nh i =1 h

(3)

In this paper, Gaussian profile is applied as kernel K . Bandwidth h is determined by the existing method (Sheather et al., 1991). Estimated result of a retention density in the SM railway station during 0:10 pm to 1:50 pm is shown in Figure 13. Yellow colour represents a high density (i.e. hot spot). Retention patters were slightly changed after the refurbishment. The frequency of checking the specific information is increased in Figure 13-(b). The result in the case of the SS railway station is shown in Figure 14. Patterns were also changed as well as the SM railway station. In the Figure 14-(b), hot spot are shifted approximately 4 m to the backside compared to Figure 14-(a). We may say that the effect of an increasing checkcapability of LED. As a result, passengers can decide what information is provided even though they stand apart from the LED. Paper 220

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Guidance Information Board

Guidance Information Board

Outside

Outside

(a) Before refurbishment

(b) After refurbishment

Figure 13. Estimated density of stationary passengers around guidance information board in the SM railway station during 0:10 pm to 1:50 pm.

Entrance gate

Entrance gate

Outside

Guidance Information Board

Outside

Guidance Information Board

(a) Before refurbishment

(b) After refurbishment

Figure 14. Estimated density of stationary passengers around guidance information board in the SS railway station during 0:10 pm to 1:50 pm. 6 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we examine the feasibility for analysing passenger flow in railway stations using laser scanners. Although the tracking algorithms is still not robust and accurate enough to follow each individual and track the complete trajectories in large crowd, effectiveness of our method for examining passenger flow and finding their tendency in a crowded environment is proved. In future work, we will develop an activity recognition system stated in section 3.2 that can detect specific activity patterns. REFERENCES Ajo Fod, Andrew Howard, and Maja J Mataric. (2002) Laser-Based People Tracking, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation, pp. 3024-3029. Anand Panangadan, Maja Mataric, and Gaurav Sukhatme. (2004) Detecting Anomalous Human Interactions using Laser Range-finders, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems(IROS), Paper 220

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pp.2136-2141. E.Prassler, J.Scholz, and A.Elfes, (1999) Tracking People in a Railway Station during Rush-Hour, International Conference on Vision Systems, January, pp. 162-179. Chris Brunsdon. (1995) Estimating probability surfaces for geographical point data: An adaptive kernel algorithm, Computers & Geosciences, Vol. 21, No. 7, pp. 887-894. Dorin.Camaniciu, V.Ramesh and P.Meer. (2003) Kernel-based object tracking, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 25, No. 5, pp. 564-575. G.Cielniak, M.Bennewitz, and W.Burgard. (2003) Where is? learning and utilizing motion patterns of persons with mobile robots. Proceedings of Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp. 909-914. Huijing Zhao and Ryosuke Shibasaki. (2005) A novel system for tracking pedestrians using multiple single-row laser range scanners, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-part A, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 283-291. Katsuyuki Nakamura, Huijing Zhao, Ryosuke Shibasaki, Kiyoshi Sakamoto, Tomowo Ooga, and Naoki Suzukawa. (2005) Tracking Pedestrians using Multiple Single-row Laser Range Scanners and its Reliability Evaluation, IEICE Journal on Information and Systems, Vol.J88-D-II, No.7, in press (in Japanese). Michael Isard, and Andrew Blake. (1998) Condensation - Conditional Density Propagation for Visual Tracking, International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 5-28. Sheather, S. J. and Jones, M. C. (1991) A reliable data-based bandwidth selection method for kernel density estimation. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society series B, Vol. 53, pp. 683-690. Somboon Hongeng, Francois Bremond, and Ramakant Nevatia. (2000) Representation and Optimal Recognition of Human Activities, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Vol.1, pp. 1818-1825.

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