Virtual Human Simulation has been widely used for different purposes, such as comfort or accessibility analysis. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using this type of technique to extend the training datasets of pedestrians to be used with machine learning techniques. Our main goal is to verify if Computer Graphics (CG) images of virtual humans with a simplistic rendering can be efficient in order to augment datasets used for training machine learning methods. In fact, from a machine learning point of view, there is a need to collect and label large datasets for ground truth, which sometimes demands manual annotation. In addition, find out images and videos with real people and also provide ground truth of people detection and counting is not trivial. If CG images, which can have a ground truth automatically generated, can also be used as training in machine learning techniques for pedestrian detection and counting, it can certainly facilitate and optimize the whole process of event detection. In particular, we propose to parametrize virtual humans using a data-driven approach. Results demonstrated that using the extended datasets with CG images outperforms the results when compared to only real images sequences.
Our work proposes a novel deep learning framework for estimating crowd density from static images of highly dense crowds. We use a combination of deep and shallow, fully convolutional networks to predict the density map for a given crowd image. Such a combination is used for effectively capturing both the high-level semantic information (face body detectors) and the low-level features (blob detectors), that are necessary for crowd counting under large scale variations. As most crowd datasets have limited training samples ( We present a novel procedural framework to generate an arbitrary number of labeled crowd videos (LCrowdV). The resulting crowd video datasets are used to design accurate algorithms or training models for crowded scene understanding. Our overall approach is composed of two components: a procedural simulation framework for generating crowd movements and behaviors, and a procedural rendering framework to generate different videos or images. Each video or image is automatically labeled based on the environment, number of pedestrians, density, behavior (agent personality), flow, lighting conditions, viewpoint, noise, etc. Furthermore, we can increase the realism by combining synthetically-generated behaviors with real-world background videos. We demonstrate the benefits of LCrowdV over prior labeled crowd datasets, by augmenting real dataset with it and improving the accuracy in pedestrian detection. LCrowdV has been made available as an online resource.