A deep learning approach for anomaly detection in large-scale Hajj crowds

Hajj is an annual Islamic event attended by millions of pilgrims every year from around the globe. It is considered to be the biggest religious event that includes large human crowds in the world. Managing such crowds and detecting abnormal behaviors is one of the most significant challenges for the host country, particularly the crowds of pilgrims. Most of the current solutions can only handle small-scale crowd management issues, that involve simple and clear abnormal behaviors. Therefore, there is a need to have a human abnormal behavior detection approach that can deal with large-scale crowd situations. This study aims to propose a computer vision-based framework that automatically analyzes video sequences and detects human abnormal behaviors. The Convolutional LSTM Autoencoder is used for analyzing video scenes and extracting valuable spatial and temporal features. The proposed approach has achieved a good loss reduction of 0.176587 in detecting abnormal pilgrims’ behavior. The results demonstrate a promising picture of the effectiveness of computer vision technologies to detect abnormal behavior in large-scale crowds.