Social Distance Measuring Based on Monocular Vision

Socia1 distance has been a growing concern since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out globally. Statistics indicate that keeping social distance is of great practical significance in slowing the spread of the pandemic. Traditional ranging methods rely on ultrasonic, infrared, laser or others. Unfortunately, most of these methods require Bluetooth modules or particular measuring sensors and need to fix hardwire devices on objects, which makes it costly and difficult to apply for measuring distances in various scenes. In order to reduce cost and extend application scope, this paper studies a novel ranging method based on monocular vision, which is proposed to estimate the distance between people in surveillance images. Our approach is to measure the social distance via the world coordinate relationship transformation or the principle of pinhole imaging after performing pedestrian detection. It is worth mentioning that this method only needs computer monocular vision technology, which is low in cost and suitable for an abundance of application scenarios. Through the experiment and analysis, our method shows good performance of social distance measuring in application. © 2022 IEEE.

Artificial Intelligence Based Social Distance Monitoring in Public Areas

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus called SARSCoV-2. There are two ways of contamination risk, namely spreading through droplets or aerosol-type spreading into the air with people's speech in crowded environments. The best way to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in a crowd public area is to follow social distance rules. Violation of the social distance is a common situation in areas where people frequently visit such as hospitals, schools and shopping centers. In this study, an artificial intelligence-based social distance determination study was developed in order to detect social distance violations in crowded areas. Within the scope of the study, a new dataset was proposed to determine social distance between pedestrians. The YOLOv3 algorithm, which is very successful in object detection, was compared with the SSD-MobileNET, which is considered to be a light weighted model, and the traditionally handcrafted methods Haar-like cascade and HOG methods. Inability to obtain depth information, which is one of the biggest problems encountered in monocular cameras, has been tried to be eliminated by perspective transformation. In this way, the social distance violation detected in specific area is notified by the system to the relevant people with a warning. © 2022 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.

Deep visual social distancing monitoring to combat COVID-19: A comprehensive survey.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing (SD) has played an essential role in controlling and slowing down the spread of the virus in smart cities. To ensure the respect of SD in public areas, visual SD monitoring (VSDM) provides promising opportunities by (i) controlling and analyzing the physical distance between pedestrians in real-time, (ii) detecting SD violations among the crowds, and (iii) tracking and reporting individuals violating SD norms. To the authors' best knowledge, this paper proposes the first comprehensive survey of VSDM frameworks and identifies their challenges and future perspectives. Typically, we review existing contributions by presenting the background of VSDM, describing evaluation metrics, and discussing SD datasets. Then, VSDM techniques are carefully reviewed after dividing them into two main categories: hand-crafted feature-based and deep-learning-based methods. A significant focus is paid to convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based methodologies as most of the frameworks have used either one-stage, two-stage, or multi-stage CNN models. A comparative study is also conducted to identify their pros and cons. Thereafter, a critical analysis is performed to highlight the issues and impediments that hold back the expansion of VSDM systems. Finally, future directions attracting significant research and development are derived.

Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (AI-IoT) Technologies in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review

The origin of the COVID-19 pandemic has given overture to redirection, as well as innovation to many digital technologies. Even after the progression of vaccination efforts across the globe, total eradication of this pandemic is still a distant future due to the evolution of new variants. To proactively deal with the pandemic, the health care service providers and the caretaker organizations require new technologies, alongside improvements in existing related technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning in terms of infrastructure, efficiency, privacy, and security. This paper provides an overview of current theoretical and application prospects of IoT, AI, cloud computing, edge computing, deep learning techniques, blockchain technologies, social networks, robots, machines, privacy, and security techniques. In consideration of these prospects in intersection with the COVID-19 pandemic, we reviewed the technologies within the broad umbrella of AI-IoT technologies in the most concise classification scheme. In this review, we illustrated that AI-IoT technological applications and innovations have most impacted the field of healthcare. The essential AI-IoT technologies found for healthcare were fog computing in IoT, deep learning, and blockchain. Furthermore, we highlighted several aspects of these technologies and their future impact with a novel methodology of using techniques from image processing, machine learning, and differential system modeling.

Promise Into Practice: Application of Computer Vision in Empirical Research on Social Distancing

Social scientists increasingly use video data, but large-scale analysis of its content is often constrained by scarce manual coding resources. Upscaling may be possible with the application of automated coding procedures, which are being developed in the field of computer vision. Here, we introduce computer vision to social scientists, review the state-of-the-art in relevant subfields, and provide a working example of how computer vision can be applied in empirical sociological work. Our application involves defining a ground truth by human coders, developing an algorithm for automated coding, testing the performance of the algorithm against the ground truth, and running the algorithm on a large-scale dataset of CCTV images. The working example concerns monitoring social distancing behavior in public space over more than a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we discuss prospects for the use of computer vision in empirical social science research and address technical and ethical challenges. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Sociological Methods & Research is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The Research on Social Distance Detection on the Complex Environment of Multi-Pedestrians

To keep a safe social distance plays an important role in the prevention of high-risk diseases. Aiming at the outbreak of COVID-19, in order to regulate the social distance between pedestrians and reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading among pedestrians, a multi-pedestrians distance measurement method based on monocular vision is reasonably proposed to realize the measurement of the distance between multiple pedestrians under the monitoring perspective. The pedestrian detection model is used by that method to capture the multi-pedestrians target under the monitoring perspective, and the monocular distance measurement principle is also used to achieve the distance measurement between the multi-pedestrians. Through analyzing these distances, the social distance between pedestrians can be regulated. The experimental results show that this method can efficiently and quickly detect people who do not meet the social distance norms. © 2021 IEEE.

A Vision-Based Social Distancing and Critical Density Detection System for COVID-19.

Social distancing (SD) is an effective measure to prevent the spread of the infectious Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, a lack of spatial awareness may cause unintentional violations of this new measure. Against this backdrop, we propose an active surveillance system to slow the spread of COVID-19 by warning individuals in a region-of-interest. Our contribution is twofold. First, we introduce a vision-based real-time system that can detect SD violations and send non-intrusive audio-visual cues using state-of-the-art deep-learning models. Second, we define a novel critical social density value and show that the chance of SD violation occurrence can be held near zero if the pedestrian density is kept under this value. The proposed system is also ethically fair: it does not record data nor target individuals, and no human supervisor is present during the operation. The proposed system was evaluated across real-world datasets.

Real-Time and Accurate UAV Pedestrian Detection for Social Distancing Monitoring in COVID-19 Pandemic.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly infectious virus that has created a health crisis for people all over the world. Social distancing has proved to be an effective non-pharmaceutical measure to slow down the spread of COVID-19. As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a flexible mobile platform, it is a promising option to use UAV for social distance monitoring. Therefore, we propose a lightweight pedestrian detection network to accurately detect pedestrians by human head detection in real-time and then calculate the social distancing between pedestrians on UAV images. In particular, our network follows the PeleeNet as backbone and further incorporates the multi-scale features and spatial attention to enhance the features of small objects, like human heads. The experimental results on Merge-Head dataset show that our method achieves 92.22% AP (average precision) and 76 FPS (frames per second), outperforming YOLOv3 models and SSD models and enabling real-time detection in actual applications. The ablation experiments also indicate that multi-scale feature and spatial attention significantly contribute the performance of pedestrian detection. The test results on UAV-Head dataset show that our method can also achieve high precision pedestrian detection on UAV images with 88.5% AP and 75 FPS. In addition, we have conducted a precision calibration test to obtain the transformation matrix from images (vertical images and tilted images) to real-world coordinate. Based on the accurate pedestrian detection and the transformation matrix, the social distancing monitoring between individuals is reliably achieved.