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A Social Distancing Detector

Mahesh Pardeshi

3 years ago

social distancing detector | InsideAIML
A quarantine project combining deep learning and computer vision.
Table of Contents
          1.Model selection
          2.People detection
          3.Bird eye view transformation
          4.Social distancing measurement
          5. Results and improvements
  
          During the quarantine I was spending time on how to figure out is people maintaining social distancing or not analysis. While doing this, I trained object detection models with performance and speed indicators. Having some knowledge in computer vision and given the actual context, I thought it could be interesting to use one of these to build a social distancing application.
   One of these included performing a bird eye view transformation of a picture. A bird eye view is a basically a top-down representation of a scene. It is a task often performed when building applications for automatic car driving.
This made me realize that applying such technique on a scene where we want to monitor social distancing could improve the quality of it. This article represents how I used a deep learning model along with some knowledge in computer vision to build a robust social distancing detector.
This article is going to be structured as follow:
1.Model selection
2.People detection
3.Bird eye view transformation
4.Social distancing measurement
5.Results and improvements

1. Model selection

          For this we prepared one dataset which contains 120,000 images with a total 880,000 labelled objects in these images. These models are trained to detect the 90 different types of objects labelled in this dataset. This list of objects includes a car, a toothbrush, a banana and of course a person.
They have different performances depending on the speed of the model. I made a few tests in order to determine how to leverage the quality of the model depending on the speed of the predictions. Since the goal of this application was not to be able to perform real time analysis, So I choose 28 objects out of it (detector performance on a validation set), which is quite strong, and an execution speed of 58 ms.

2. People detection

          To use such model, in order to detect persons, there are a few steps that have to be done:
o   Load the file containing the model into a tensorflow graph. and define the outputs you want to get from the model.
o   For each frame, pass the image through the graph in order to get the desired outputs.
o   Filter out the weak predictions and objects that do not need to be detected.
Load and start the model
The way tensorflow models have been designed to work is by using graphs. The first step implies loading the model into a tensorflow graph. This graph will contain the different operations that will be done in order to get the desired detections. The next step is creating a session which is an entity responsible of executing the operations defined in the previous graph. I decided to implement a class to keep all the data related to the tensorflow graph together.
class Model:

Class that contains the model and all its functions

"""

def __init__(self, model_path):

"""

Initialization function

@ model_path : path to the model 

"""

# Declare detection graph

self.detection_graph = tf.Graph()

# Load the model into the tensorflow graph
with self.detection_graph.as_default():
        od_graph_def =
tf.compat.v1.GraphDef()

with tf.io.gfile.GFile(model_path, 'rb') as file:
     serialized_graph = file.read()

od_graph_def.ParseFromString(serialized_graph)
tf.import_graph_def(od_graph_def, name='')

# Create a session from the detection graph
self.sess = tf.compat.v1.Session(graph=self.detection_graph)
def predict(self,img):

"""

Get the predicition results on 1 frame
@ img : our img vector

"""

# Expand dimensions since the model expects images to have shape: [1, none, none, 3]

img_exp = np.expand_dims(img, axis=0)

# Pass the inputs and outputs to the session to get the results 
(boxes, scores, classes) = self.sess.run([self.detection_graph.get_tensor_by_name('detection_boxes:0'),
self.detection_graph.get_tensor_by_name('detection_scores:0'), self.detection_graph.get_tensor_by_name('detection_classes:0')],feed_dict={self.detection_graph.get_tensor_by_name('image_tensor:0'):
img_exp})

return (boxes, scores, classes)
    
Pass every frame through the model
A new session is started for every frame that needs processing. This is done by calling the run() function. Some parameters have to be specified when doing so. These include the type of input that the model requires and which outputs we want to get back from it. In our case the outputs needed are the following:
o   Bounding boxes coordinates of each object
o   The confidence of each prediction (0 to 1)
o   Class of the prediction (0 to 90)
Filter out weak predictions and non-relevant objects
One of the many classes detected by the model is a person. The class associated to a person is 1.
In order to exclude both weak predictions (threshold: 0.75) and all other classes of objects except from person, I used an if statement combining both conditions to exclude any other object from further computation.
if int(classes[i]) == 1 and scores[i] > 0.75
But since these models are already pre-trained, it is not possible for them to only detect this class. Therefore, these models take quite a long time to run because they try to identify all the 90 different type of objects in the scene.

3. Bird eye view transformation

          As explained in the introduction, performing a bird eye view transformation gives us a top view of a scene. OpenCV has great built-in functions to apply this method to an image in order to transform an image taken from a perspective point of view to a top view of this image. I used a tutorial to understand how to do this.
The first step involves selecting 4 points on the original image that are going to be the corner points of the plan which is going to be transformed. This points have to form a rectangle with at least 2 opposite sides being parallel. If this is not done, the proportions will not be the same when the transformation happens. I have implemented a script available in my repository which uses the setMouseCallback() function of OpenCV to get these coordinates. The function that computes the transformation matrix also requires the dimension of the image which are computed using the image.shape propriety of an image.
width, height, _ = image.shape
This returns the width, the height and other non-relevant colour pixel values. Let’s see the how they are used to compute the transformation matrix:
def compute_perspective_transform(corner_points,width,height,image):

"""
Compute the transformation matrix

        @corner_points : 4 corner points selected from the image

        @height, width : size of the image

        return : transformation matrix and the transformed image

"""

        #Create an array out of the 4 corner points

        corner_points_array = np.float32(corner_points)

        #Create an array with the parameters (the dimensions) required to build the matrix

        img_params = np.float32([[0,0],[width,0],[0,height],[width,height]])

        # Compute and return the transformation matrix

        matrix = cv2.getPerspectiveTransform(corner_points_array,img_params) 

        img_transformed = cv2.warpPerspective(image,matrix,(width,height))

        return matrix,img_transformed
Note that I chose to also return the matrix because it will be used in the next step to compute the new coordinates of each person detected. The result of this are the “GPS” coordinates of each person in the frame. It is far more accurate to use these than use the original ground points, because in a perspective view, the distance is not the same when people are in different plans, not at the same distance from the camera. Compared to using the points in the original frame, this could improve the social distancing measurement a lot.
For each person detected, the 2 points that are needed to build a bounding box a returned. The points are the top left corner of the box and the bottom right corner. From these, I computed the centroid of the box by getting the middle point between them. Using this result, I calculated the coordinates of the point located at the bottom centre of the box. In my opinion, this point, which I refer to as the ground point, is the best representation of the coordinate of a person in an image.
Then I used the transformation matrix to compute the transformed coordinates for each ground point detected. This is done on each frame, using the cv2.perspectiveTransform(), after having detected the person in it. This is how I implemented this task:
def compute_point_perspective_transformation(matrix,list_downoids):

"""
Apply the perspective transformation to every ground point which have been
detected on the main frame.

        @matrix : the 3x3 matrix 

        @list_downoids : list that contains the points to transform

        return: list containing all the new points

 """

        #Compute the new coordinates of our points

        list_points_to_detect= np.float32(list_downoids).reshape(-1, 1, 2)

        transformed_points= cv2.perspectiveTransform(list_points_to_detect, matrix)

        #Loop over the points and add them to the list that will be returned

        transformed_points_list= list()

        for i in range(0,transformed_points.shape[0]):

                  transformed_points_list.append([transformed_points[i][0][0],transformed_points[i][0][1]])

        return transformed_points_list

4. Measuring social distancing

          After calling this function on each frame, a list containing all the new transformed points is returned. From this list I had to compute the distance between each pair of points. I used the function combinations() from the itertools library which allows to get every possible combination in a list without keeping doubles. This is very well explained on this stack overflow issue. The rest is simple math: the distance between two points is easy to do in python using the math.sqrt() function. The threshold chosen was 120 pixels, because it is approximatively equal to 2 feet in our scene.
# Check if 2 or more people have been detected (otherwise no need to detect)
  if len(transformed_downoids) >= 2:
    # Iterate over every possible 2 by 2 between the points combinations 
    list_indexes = list(itertools.combinations(range(len(transformed_downoids)), 2))
    for i,pair in enumerate(itertools.combinations(transformed_downoids, r=2)):
      # Check if the distance between each combination of points is less than the minimum distance chosen
      if math.sqrt( (pair[0][0] - pair[1][0])**2 + (pair[0][1] - pair[1][1])**2 ) < int(distance_minimum):
        # Change the colors of the points that are too close from each other to red
        change_color_topview(pair)
        # Get the equivalent indexes of these points in the original frame and change the color to red
        index_pt1 = list_indexes[i][0]
        index_pt2 = list_indexes[i][1]
        change_color_originalframe(index_pt1,index_pt2)
Once 2 points are identified being too close from one another, the colour of the circle marking the point is changed from green to red and same for the bounding box on the original frame.

5. Results

Let me resume how this project works :
1.      First get the 4 corner points of the plan and apply the perspective transformation to get a bird view of this plan and save the transformation matrix.
2.      Get the bounding box for each person detected in the original frame.
3.      Compute the lowest point of this box. It is the point located between both feet.
4.      Use the transformation matrix to each of theses points to get the real “GPS” coordinates of each person.
5.      Use itertools.combinations() to measure the distance from every points to all the other ones in the frame.
6.      If a social distancing violation is detected, change the color of the bounding box to red.
I used a video which consists of multisensor sequences containing different crowd activities. It was originally build for tasks like person counting and density estimation in crowds. I decided to use video from the 1st angle because it was the widest one, with the best view of the scene.
   
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