ACSEE: Antagonistic Crowd Simulation Model With Emotional Contagion and Evolutionary Game Theory

Antagonistic crowd behaviors are often observed in cases of serious conflict. Antagonistic emotions, which is the typical psychological state of agents in different roles (i.e., cops, activists, and civilians) in crowd violence scenes, and the way they spread through contagion in a crowd are important causes of crowd antagonistic behaviors. Moreover, games, which refers to the interaction between opposing groups adopting different strategies to obtain higher benefits and less casualties, determine the level of crowd violence. We present an antagonistic crowd simulation model (ACSEE), which is integrated with antagonistic emotional contagion and evolutionary game theories. Our approach models the antagonistic emotions between agents in different roles using two components: mental emotion and external emotion. We combine enhanced susceptible-infectious-susceptible (SIS) and game approaches to evaluate the role of antagonistic emotional contagion in crowd violence. Our evolutionary game theoretic approach incorporates antagonistic emotional contagion through deterrent force, which is modelled by a mixture of emotional forces and physical forces defeating the opponents. Antagonistic emotional contagion and evolutionary game theories influence each other to determine antagonistic crowd behaviors. We evaluate our approach on real-world scenarios consisting of different kinds of agents. We also compare the simulated crowd behaviors with real-world crowd videos and use our approach to predict the trends of crowd movements in violence incidents. We investigate the impact of various factors (number of agents, emotion, strategy, etc.) on the outcome of crowd violence. We present results from user studies suggesting that our model can simulate antagonistic crowd behaviors similar to those seen in real-world scenarios.

1 Introduction

Crowd simulation has received increased attention in virtual reality, games, urban modeling, and pedestrian dynamics. One of the most important tasks in crowd simulation is to generate realistic crowd behaviors. Physical methods [1], [2], [3], psychology principles [4], [5], [6], or approaches from other relatively matured disciplines [7], [8], [9], [10] are leveraged into the crowd simulation to improve the similarity between simulation results and real-world crowd movements. As pointed out in [4], emotion has a great influence on crowd behavior and it often invokes an agent to implement either a positive or negative behavioral response. Thus, the emotion modeling in crowd simulation is always the main focus in latest research work. However, the emotional aspect of antagonistic crowd behaviors among people in different roles is left unexplored [11]. Analyzing the emotions of antagonistic crowd behaviors is indeed extremely important, as it can help us understand evolution process of antagonistic crowd behaviors and predict trends of crowd movements.