Incident Management in Crowd Gathering – GIRAFE

During the next Olympic Games in Paris 2024, France will face a major security challenge because of a series of sports events, relayed around the World, involving personalities and the public. The history of the Games and sports has unfortunately already left traces of painful events, which we have the responsibility not to allow to reproduce here. On the basis of a sociological study of these risks, and in order to answer this challenge, the GIRAFE project proposes to develop algorithmic crowd control solutions based on video streams covering all or part of the public areas. These algorithms will in particular be able to alert the authorities of areas where crowds can become of concern, to monitor the flow of crowds and to anticipate possible phenomena of congestion; but also to identify abnormal cases occurring within such crowds, such as suspicious strolling of an individual, a chase or the transport and abandonment of a baggage, and to track their perpetrators to a possible interpellation. The tools created by the project will be in the spirit of facilitating the intervention of law enforcement and optimizing the use of security personnel, whose resources are limited and critical for an event of this magnitude. The human operator will remain the sole decision-maker of the actions to be taken during a warning. The legal and societal aspects associated with these video treatments will be studied and taken into account, to ensure the respect of the French legal framework, the GDPR, and keep the festive spirit of the Games.
The project's various innovative algorithms use complementary approaches to detect abnormal events and manage the movement of crowds, so as to ensure maximum detection of risk situations and to trace alerts as quickly as possible. The research of the project will be based on three main pillars:
- the movements of crowds, to manage the flow and the abnormal behaviors within a very dense crowd (specific approach in very dense zone);
- the detection of abnormal behaviors, of which the learning of scenes given in JOP 2024 will make it possible to identify cases out of the ordinary (generic approach);
- detection of pedestrians and baggage, transverse to the two previous axes, since in addition to the case of abandoned parcels (specific approach in sparsely populated area) this axis will ensure the identification and monitoring of the suspect individual to his arrest by the police
The algorithms resulting from these thematic axes will be integrated into a demonstrator that optimizes the real-time processing of these algorithms, ergonomic for the end users, and prioritizes the flow of video surveillance cameras classified at risk or as unusual. The demonstrator will also be connected to a "Command and Control" in order to present to the operator, in a clear and global way, the cases of crowd movements to manage. The whole will be tested under pre-operational conditions and will reach a sufficient level of maturity, TRL6, to allow its deployment and its evaluation on various Olympic sites or in various places of the city of Paris at the end of the project.