A novel sparse representation model for pedestrian abnormal trajectory understanding.

• A novel sparse representation method for pedestrian trajectory abnormal analysis. • Utilizing Lp-regularization (0 < p < 1) to get sparser solutions. • An effective solver for the proposed method with EM algorithm and entropy. Pedestrian abnormal trajectory understanding based on video surveillance systems can improve public safety. However, manually identifying pedestrian abnormal trajectories is usually a prohibitive workload. The objective of this study is to propose an automatic method for understanding pedestrian abnormal trajectories. An improved sparse representation model, namely information entropy constrained trajectory representation method (IECTR), is developed for pedestrian trajectory classification. It aims to reduce the entropy for trajectory representation and to obtain superior analyzing results. In the proposed method, the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is embedded in the expectation maximization (EM) method to iteratively obtain the selection probabilities and the sparse coefficients. In addition, the lower-bound sparser condition of L p -minimization (0 < p < 1) is applied in the proposed method to guarantee salient solutions. In order to validate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method, classification experiments are conducted using five pedestrian trajectory datasets. The results show that the identification accuracy of the proposed method is superior to the compared methods, including naïve Bayes classifier (NBC), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and typical sparse representation-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]