The recognition and prediction of people activities from videos are major concerns in the field of computer vision. The main objective of my thesis is to propose algorithms that analyze human behavior from video. This problem is also called video content analysis or VCA. This analysis is performed in outdoor or indoor environments using simple webcams or more sophisticated surveillance cameras. The video scene can be of two types depending on the number of people present. The first type is characterized by the presence of only one person at a time in the video. We call this an individual scene where we will tackle the problem of human action recognition. The second type of scene contains a large number of persons. This is called a crowd scene where we will address the problems of motion pattern extraction, crowd event detection and people counting. To achieve our goals, we propose an approach based on three levels of analysis. The first level is the detection of low-level descriptors retrieved from the images of the video (e.g. areas in motion). The second level retrieves descriptors for modeling human behavior (e.g. average speed and direction of movement). The top level uses the descriptors of the intermediate step to provide users with concrete results on the analysis of behavior (e.g. this person is running, that one is walking, etc.). Experimentation on well-known benchmarks have validated our approaches, with very satisfying results compared to the state of the art.
