The effect of physical factors on crowd walking behavior at religious gatherings

In order to assess and increase the safety at most crowded places like transportation terminals, political, cultural, religious gatherings, stadiums etc., the crowd behavior is to be understood since the paths followed by all individuals in the crowd are unpredictable in complex situations. The increasing number of persons in the crowd with different behavior reduces the speeds of individuals due to the more interactions. The speed of the each individual in the crowd is affected by their physical factors like age, gender, luggage, etc. In this study, the effect of factors (gender, age, and luggage) on crowd speed is studied and analyzed. The speeds of the persons in the crowd are extracted by using TRACKER software. The count of persons in each frame is done by MATLAB using foreground detection by background subtraction. Statistical tests are conducted on the speed by using physical factors to know the significance difference between various groups and also the speed–flow–density relationships are developed. From the statistical tests, it was shown that the age and gender effect is more on the speed and there is no effect of luggage on speed. The observations of this study into the reasons for critical crowd conditions are important for the organization of safer mass events.