Intelligent Real-Time Crowd Density Estimation for Proactive Event Safety: A Machine Learning Approach

High-density crowd events like public concerts, sporting events, or religious festivals represent significant safety challenges due to high crowd density. Methods of monitoring crowds using manual observation or passive surveillance often don't provide real-time information. Therefore, we present a real-time crowd density estimation solution that utilizes YOLOv8 for people detection and CSRNet for density estimation. The crowd density estimation system utilizes live video feeds from direct surveillance cameras/CCTV or drone footage. The system will assess the crowd density in four levels across four distinct areas: Low, Medium, High, or Critical crowd density. The density estimator has a web-based dashboard that provides real-time analytics reports, heatmap density estimates, and historical records, which can assist in making quick, informed decisions and assessments following an event. The system is validated on benchmark datasets and real-world video streams with 95.3% detection accuracy, 7.4 MAE in crowd counting and 28 FPS processing with off-the-shelf GPU hardware. The results show high accuracy with low latency, making it feasible for real-world applications for large-scale events. The main contributions of the work include using YOLOv8 integrated with CSRNet to jointly detect and estimate crowds, developing a real-time dashboard to provide transparent crowd analytics, and system validation with quantitative metrics and real-world evidence.