Paulo Aguayo

The platform–train interface (PTI) is considered a complex space where most interactions occur between passengers boarding and alighting. These interactions are critical under crowded conditions, affecting the experience of traveling and therefore the quality of life. The problem is that urban railway operators do not know what the density at the PTI is in real time, and therefore it is not possible to obtain a measure of the personal space of passengers boarding and alighting the train. To address this problem, a new method is developed to estimate the density of passengers on urban railway platforms using laboratory experiments. In those experiments, the use of computer vision is attractive, through the training of neural networks and image processing. The experiments considered a mock-up of a train carriage and its adjacent platform. In the boarding process, the results showed that the density using Voronoi polygons reached up to a 300% difference compared to the average values of density using Fruin’s Level of Service. However, in the case of alighting, that difference reached about 142% due to the space available for wheelchair users who needed assistance. These results would help practitioners to know where passengers are located at the PTI and, therefore, which part of the platform is more congested, requiring the implementation of crowd management measures in real time. Further studies need to include other types of passengers and different situations in existing stations.

In recent years, much effort has been devoted to the development of applications capable of detecting different types of human activity. In this field, fall detection is particularly relevant, especially for the elderly. On the one hand, some applications use wearable sensors that are integrated into cell phones, necklaces or smart bracelets to detect sudden movements of the person wearing the device. The main drawback of these types of systems is that these devices must be placed on a person’s body. This is a major drawback because they can be uncomfortable, in addition to the fact that these systems cannot be implemented in open spaces and with unfamiliar people. In contrast, other approaches perform activity recognition from video camera images, which have many advantages over the previous ones since the user is not required to wear the sensors. As a result, these applications can be implemented in open spaces and with unknown people. This paper presents a vision-based algorithm for activity recognition. The main contribution of this work is to use human skeleton pose estimation as a feature extraction method for activity detection in video camera images. The use of this method allows the detection of multiple people’s activities in the same scene. The algorithm is also capable of classifying multi-frame activities, precisely for those that need more than one frame to be detected. The method is evaluated with the public UP-FALL dataset and compared to similar algorithms using the same dataset.