S2UCRE

Abstract Mass gatherings at large events and demonstrations in public urban spaces are an expres-sion of freedom and openness in European societies. German and French citizens enjoy sport events, like marathon runs, festivals like the Cannstatter Wasn in Stuttgart, the Munich Oktoberfest, or Francofolies de la Rochelle, Feria de Bayonne, Fetes des Lumières in Lyon and many more. Festivals and politically motivated demonstrations alike involve threats for the safety and security of citizens. Therefore, organizers and public authorities are facing new challenges and are in need of new solutions. In this project, partners from academia, civil security forces, one large security industry partner and several small enter-prises join forces to investigate and evaluate solution strategies, methods and concepts. S²UCRE stands for Safety & Security of Urban Crowded Environments. The project addresses mass gatherings in complex scenarios and widespread urban environments. In such situations, the crowd is often inhomogeneous in terms of density and motion dynamics. In addition, pedestrians are distributed over large areas. The surveillance of the course of the event is challenging for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) even without disturb-ances. An up-to-date overview is often missing. Fast reaction in case of accidents, offen-sive behaviour, or crowd densities that trap people and endanger lives (often referred to as “panic situations”) is difficult, pre-emptive measures seem impossible. To overcome these problems, the S²UCRE project aims to interconnect crowd monitoring based on video analytics with simulation-based methods for short-term prediction of crowd behaviour. Two concrete events are selected as scenarios: the Hamburg Harbour Festival (1.5 million visitors) and the May 1st demonstrations in Paris (12000 attendees). S²UCRE furthermore intends to bridge the gap between the macro level of crowd moni-toring and observation of individuals or groups when there is reasonable ground for suspicion. Carrying out research on five interdependent support technologies for LEAs, event organizers, security staff and rescue teams, S²UCRE will improve the collaboration of stakeholders responsible for security. Studies on human factors form an integral part of the technical work packages and thus go beyond accompanying re-search. A fundamental work package is dedicated to legal and ethical aspects. The S²UCRE demonstrator will integrate the support technologies, thus providing a proof of concept for predictive analytics tools. In particular, ways to guide crowds based on predic-tive simulation will be explored. The five technology areas are: • Video-based crowd monitoring of distributed urban environments: crowd densities and crowd dynamics. • Short-term prediction of crowd behaviour for fast and efficient evacuation. • Semi-automated suspicious behaviour analysis for security applications. • Detection & (geo-) localisation of perpetrators. • Self-localisation of security and rescue team members and a communication platform for geo-registered information exchange between security and rescue personnel. Unlike other projects, S²UCRE will not develop these technologies individually but will focus the research on how to integrate a continuous workflow into a single system. This will combine the current security and safety situation with short-term simulations of the crowd that are used to prevent critical conditions. S²UCRE envisions an integrated surveillance and prediction system that addresses safety and security and that is tested on concrete scenarios.