Federated Learning based Path Planning Method for Crowd Evacuation

Zihao Yuan, Dianjie Lu, Guijuan Zhang, Hong Liu

Abstract: The surveillance videos captured by cameras deployed in large-scale places can provide help for path planning of crowd evacuation in emergencies. However, most surveillance videos are not allowed to be shared in order to avoid privacy disclosure. Thus, it is difficult to obtain the video data of the whole scenario for path planning which greatly reduces effectiveness of path planning. How to provide global path planning for crowd evacuation while ensuring privacy protection is a challenging problem. To solve this problem, we propose a federated learning based path planning method for crowd evacuation. In this method, the potential field model are introduced into the federated learning framework to provide the privacy protection since only the potential field information is aggregated between the camera terminal and the central server, instead of the surveillance videos. First, we construct the local potential field for the surveillance scene of each camera by extracting the scene information and the crowds information. Second, the central server periodically performs the global potential field information aggregation and integrates these information to plan the optimal global path dynamically for crowd evacuation. Finally, we implemente a simulation platform to simulate the process of crowd movement and visualize the dynamic change of the potential energy field. Experimental results prove that the proposed method can provide privacy-preserving path planning for multi-camera evacuation scenarios.