The dynamic capture of situational awareness concerning crowds in specific mass gathering venues and its intelligent enablement into emergency management information systems, using smart communication devices and spaces is critical for achieving rapid, timely guidance and safe evacuation of people out of dangerous areas. In eVACUATE, the intelligent fusion of sensors, geospatial and contextual information, with advanced multi-scale crowd behaviour detection and recognition, is being developed using computer vision. The structured fusion of sensing information with dynamic estimated uncertainties on behaviour predictions is advancing eVACUATE crowd dynamic models and virtual reality simulations of crowds in confined environments. Decision-makers at the command posts, first responders, front-line stewards and volunteers receive real-time situation aware information of updated evacuation strategies using robust and resilient eVACUATE information and communication infrastructure.
The eVACUATE system performance and scalability will be validated in five distinct pilot scenarios involving incidents with large crowd at various confined venues. These include: ââ¬Â¢Real Sociedad Anoeta football stadium in San Sebastian, Spain; ââ¬Â¢STX largest cruise ship in the world, St Nazaire, France; ââ¬Â¢Athens International Airport, Greece ââ¬Â¢Metro station in Bilbao, Spain.
Our eVacuate research team at IT Innovation Centre, has also performed key experiments involving visible, thermal and hyper-spectral vision camera installations at the Anoeta Stadium and Athens International Airport, Satellite experimental Terminal for the study of crowd behaviour. Scenarios on crowd behaviour were directed on volunteers in collaboration with research partners in Greece and Spain to generate vision data, which are currently under study. More recently, October 2016, my research team together with partners around Europe successfully completed a pilot at the Real Sociedad Anoeta football stadium in San Sebastian, Spain. (For information, please see: http://www.realsociedad.com/document/view/spa/0/207461/anoeta-participo-en-un-simulacro-de--evacuate-