Investigating Cultural Aspects in the Fundamental Diagram using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a study regarding group behavior in a controlled experiment focused on differences in an important attribute that vary across cultures - the personal spaces - in two Countries: Brazil and Germany. In order to coherently compare Germany and Brazil evolutions with same population applying same task, we performed the pedestrian Fundamental Diagram experiment in Brazil, as performed in Germany. We use convolutional neural networks to detect and track people in video sequences. With this data, we use Voronoi Diagrams to find out the neighbor relation among people and then compute the walking distances to find out the personal spaces. Based on personal spaces analyses, we found out that people behavior is more similar in high dense populations. So, we focused our study on cultural differences between the two Countries in low and medium densities. Results indicate that personal space analyses can be a relevant feature in order to understand cultural aspects in video sequences even when compared with data from self-reported questionnaires.