Realistic Interactive Pedestrian Simulation and Visualization for Virtual 3D Environments

We present a visual computing effort to realistically and interactively simulate and visualize aspects of human motion behavior in virtual 3D environments. It allows virtually changing the infrastructure of a layout and assessing the consequences in terms of motion paths and visibility (where will people look at?). We first create a virtual 3D model of an infrastructure with photogrammetric reconstruction of images and obtain high-resolution video footage of real-world scenarios of the infrastructure. We calibrate video information with the 3D model in order to optimize an automatic human detection and tracking algorithm and to obtain real-world trajectories of people in world coordinates of major ground plane. These real world trajectories provide input to strategic and tactial movement aspects of pedestrian simulations and help validating the human motion simulations. The simulated pedestrian trajectories are the base for path visualizations and visibility analyses in the virtual environment. Our case study comprises an entry hall of a train station, but the approach is applicable to other environments such as museums.