Abstract
This article proposes a novel ultralarge-scale crowd monitoring system, namely, the ULCM system. The ULCM system enables advanced sensing and networking technologies aimed at collecting and processing multimodal, multiperspective, and real-time crowding data relevant to crowd management. This data will be further analyzed to provide a global realization of evolving events over a large geographical area as they occur in real time. The ULCM is the infrastructure component of an intelligent platform that is being developed by our research group to provide crowd intelligence to decision makers through an interactive digitized visual environment. In order to achieve a full comprehensive scene overview, the ULCM deployment utilizes a multiplicity of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) agents in different operational scenarios. The aerial deployment and control are realized by custom multiple UAV networks and airborne LiDAR sensors. The deployment and control on the ground sensory agents are based on multiple subnetworks, including closed-circuit television (CCTV) and infrared gas and ultrasonic sensors networks. Eventually, ULCM employs the software-defined network (SDN) and edge cloud technologies to optimize the networking and data analytics performance from the perspective of infrastructure.