International Electrical and Electronics Engineering Conference (IEEEC-2021)

Social distancing detection using AI which can help

in deciding lockdown status
Ankur Srivastava1, Aryan Verma2, Gaurav Mishra3
1Delhi
Technological University
{ank.sri1004, aryanv28699, mishra.gaurav1998}@gmail.com

Abstract: There is absolutely no obscurity in the fact that COVID-19 led pandemic has put the whole world into jeopardy and has apparently
brought the important activities to a halt. The major step that the authorities have come up with is Social Distancing. Our project puts light
on the process of detecting and examining whether social distancing is being followed and implemented properly in a particular area.

We propose a model which makes it easy for the authorities to substantially ramp up the social distancing detection systems. Our project
incorporates the usage of Deep Learning concepts which would alert the concerned authorities as soon as there are more people than the
allowed limit and less distance between two people than the allowed limit. An active surveillance system which is able to measure distances
between two individuals and produce a warning sign can be useful to slow down the speed of spreading this virus.
We are proposing an AI based social distancing detection system which will encompass the following:
1. System shouldn’t record the data for the long term.
2. There should be no human involvement in the detection loop.
3. The code ought to be available to the overall population.

Keywords: Obscurity, Jeopardy, Substantially, Incorporates

diagnosis and the detection process of this infection consists of

I. INTRODUCTION
COVID-19 is a contagious disease caused by the novel Sars
CoronaVirus-2. This emergence of this deadly virus could be
traced back to the month of December of the year 2019 in the
Wuhan city of China. This virus has been quite relentless and
has been testing the health care facilities of countries across
the world. As per our knowledge of the history related to
pandemics, we can very well understand that the effect of
pandemics can not only be experienced on the socio-cultural
gamut but also hampers and distorts the economic system of
many countries.
According to the reports of the BBC, the previous pandemics
have ruthlessly vanished out populations around the world.
The Plague of Justinian vanished out around half of the global
population in the 6th century of the common era. 0.2 billion
fatalities could be traced down to the havoc caused by the
‘Black Death’ in the 14th century of the common era.
Smallpox killed 0.3 billion people in the 20th century in spite
of the availability of an effective vaccine since the 18th
century. The Covid-19 led pandemic is an addition to the list
of pandemics and a once-in-a-century pandemic that has
proved disastrous not just for the human resource but also for
the economic setup.
The infection is at the peak for the initial 3 days. The
symptoms can be nausea, fatigue, dry cough, fever, cold,
weakness, loss of taste and smell, sore throat and headache. It
takes around 14-16 days for a covid infected patient to
recover. The period of recovery varies from
patient to patient and is governed by the severity of the
infection and the immunity system of the individuals. The
RT-PCR tests and CT imaging. Reverse Transcription-
Polymerase Chain Reaction or RT-PCR is a real time
diagnosis which incorporates the usage of nasopharyngeal
swabs. Chest CT imaging detects the increased possibility of
infection based on symptoms and risk factors.
Through the following study, we aim to develop a computer
vision system which would help gauge the distance between
objects through the stereo view of the camera deployed.
Initially, the distances between the face images are obtained.
Our research is aimed at providing data to the authorities to
decide on the lockdown status of a certain region and at which
times.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Social Distancing for COVID-19
COVID-19 has been relentlessly causing acute respiratory
syndromes around the corners of the world since the month of
December in 2019 [1]. Social distancing has proved to be an
effective measure to slow down and put some breaks on the
spread of COVID-19 [2]. This measure has proved to be of
great importance and has been supported by quite a few works
accomplished in recent times. Social distancing can be defined
as maintaining a distance of at least 2 meters (6 feet) between
two individuals to avoid the possibility of contact.
On continued analysis and series of experiments it has been
accepted that social distancing has been quite beneficial
economically [3]. COVID-19 is going to be with us for years
to some and it may be quite difficult to completely eliminate
this virus in the short term. In such a scenario there has been
an urgent need for an
 International Electrical and Electronics Engineering Conference (IEEEC-2021)
automated system that can help examine and monitor social
distancing measures and help the society comply with the
COVID guidelines. This way we can prove to be advantageous
for society.
B. Human Detection
This research work basically focuses on the implementation of
pedestrian detection as a general object detection problem or
as a dedicated model or framework for the detection of
pedestrians only. A well explained survey of 2D object
detectors including metrics, compiled datasets and
fundamentals can be easily found [4]. Deep learning concept
has also been used in one of the surveys for the detection of
generalised objects as well as the detection of pedestrians [5].
This model incorporates the usage of deep learning concepts
and can be further classified into 2 broad divisions. The very
first being the Two-stage detectors which incorporates the
usage of R-CNN concepts [6, 7, 8, 9]. It initiates with region
proposals followed by the stratification process and then a
bounding box regression. The next broad division is the One-
stage detectors. Some of the well known models using one-
stage detectors are YOLOv1-v4 [9, 10, 11], SSD, RetinaNet
and EfficientDet.
Apart from these anchor-based approaches there are various
anchor-free approaches: CornerNet, FCOS and RepPoints.
These models were scrutinized on datasets of Pascal VOC and
MS COCO. These approaches have good efficiency as well as
real-time performance and hence can be incorporated as pre
trained models to ramp up the social distancing detection
measures.
C. Some other models
In [13], a simulated model has been developed by the authors
and displayed the probable effect of abiding by the social
distancing norms and avoiding physical touch as measures to
check transmission of virus. Nevertheless, the impacts could
be impacted by the way in which the higher and concerned
authorities implement these regulations without leaving any
loophole. Imposition of strict lockdown could also be
considered as a measure. The incorporation of video
surveillance devices to examine social distancing can be of
great use.
The process of detection is more or less the same in all the
applications. There are 3 main segregations: Object Feature
Description, Object Detection, Object Classification. The very
first step of the proceeding is Object Feature Description. This
basically involves feature detection and feature extraction.
Feature Detection involves Edge Detection, Corner Detection,
Blob Detection, Ridge Detection and some other algorithms,
some of them being Canny, FAST, LoG etc. Profound learning
methods like neural organizations like CNN, RCNN, Fast
RCNN, and so forth and a couple of calculations like
AdaBoost Algorithm, Face DNR are for the most part utilized
for discovery of the item.The next step is Object
Classification. It involves a bulk of algorithms for
classification. The results of the comparative study of the
feature extraction techniques carried along with several
classifiers suggested that SURF 128 + XCSLBP technique
along with the SVM-linear classifier produced an accuracy of
99.2% and is the finer approach for this as mentioned in [14]
III. PRELIMINARIES
A. Deep learning based detection of object
Detection of objects in the image world is a very elemental
problem of computer vision. The primary aim is to identify
occurrences of bodies that belong to some specific categories,
for example, humans, cars, establishments, etc. In recent times
object identification gauges have been dominated by deep
CNN models.
The training of these models is done using supervised learning
with methods such as data augmentation so that the variety of
data can be increased.
.
B. Model Generalization
The generalisation capacity of avant-garde is satisfactory for
stationing pre-trained models to new conditions. For 2-D
entity identification pre-trained models can bring out good
accuracy irrespective of the make of camera, angle of the view
or the lighting conditions.
Thus, a pre-trained neural network based human detection
system can be directly used for the analysis.
IV. METHOD
We put forward the usage of CCTV footage for detecting
social distancing violations without recording any data. We
use our model to detect if there are any social distancing
violations and alert the system. We also use a metric called
social density to monitor the extent of social distancing.
A. Problem formulation
We are interested in finding the number of social distancing
violations and we try to find the social density and ensure it
stays below a critical threshold which we will find empirically.
We can set up an alert if the number of social distancing
violations crosses a threshold set by the authorities.
B. Human Detection
We use a pretrained model called GoogleNet to detect
humans. GoogLeNet is a 22-layer deep convolutional neural
network that is based on the Inception Network, a Deep CNN
developed by researchers at Google.The GoogLeNet
architecture consists of 22 layers (27 layers including pooling
layers), and part of these layers are a total of 9 inception
modules(figure 5)[15]. Table 1 gives the architecture of the
model.
For every object identified by the model, we get the class of
the object and four coordinates, the top left, top right, bottom
left and bottom right pixel of the bounding box. We are
interested in the middle point of the bottom edge of bounding
box, which we define as (pose vector).
Let X₀, Y₀ and X₁, Y₁ be the coordinates of the bottom left and
bottom right pixels of bounding box, 𝐩 is given by,
(X₀ + X₁)/2 , (Y₀ + Y₁)/2.
 International Electrical and Electronics Engineering Conference (IEEEC-2021)
TABLE I: GOOGLENET ARCHITECTURE (WHERE POOL PROJ. IS THE NUMBER OF
1X1 FILTERS USED AFTER POOLING WITHIN AN INCEPTION MODULE, PARAMS.
REFERS TO THE NUMBER OF WEIGHTS WITHIN THE CURRENT ARCHITECTURE
COMPONENT, OPS REFERS TO THE NUMBER OF OPERATIONS CARRIED OUT
WITHIN THE COMPONENT)
C. Bird’s Eye View Mapping
We need to map the angled view to a bird’s eye view. To do
this we need to apply a calibrated IPM(inverse perspective
mapping) transition.For this, we require camera location, its
height and angle of view, we can estimate them with various
methods if they aren’t available to us.
By applying IPM we can convert the 2D image points (x,y) to
corresponding world coordinate points(Xw,Yw,Zw).
Where R is the rotation matrix,
R=
T is the translation matrix,
T=
and K is the intrinsic parameters of the camera,
K=
where h is the camera height, f is focal length, and ku and kv
are the measured calibration coefficient values in horizontal
and vertical pixel units, respectively. (cx, cy) is the principal
point shifts that corrects the optical axis of the image plane
[16].
D. Finding Distance Between Pedestrians
After finding real world coordinates, we can find the euclidean
distance between any two pedestrians.We can also find the
social distancing violations by checking if this distance is
below the threshold.
E. Critical Social Density Evaluation
We need to track down a basic social density that would make
sure that the likelihood of social distancing infringement is
low. We use a linear regression model to estimate this value.
We use the total number of violations y and social density p as
our two variables.
y = A0 + A1*p
We can generate data for this model using the results of our
pedestrian detection model.
V. EXPERIMENT
We ran our model on a video dataset of a busy street which
gave us enough pedestrian footage for the model to give
accurate results of the problem we intend to solve.We divided
our code into two parts, the first one detects pedestrians and
the second one to detect the social distancing or the social
critical density status.
A. Implementation Details:
We need to find the perspective transformation matrix to get
accurate distance between two objects since CCTV’s give an
angled perspective. For datasets that don’t have information
about the height of CCTV and the interval between few crucial
positions that can be used for making our frame of reference
transformation matrix we would have to estimate the size of
objects given in the video and then try to estimate the
perspective transformation matrix.
We estimated the distances between key points in our dataset.
After finding the perspective transformation matrix we run our
pedestrian detection code on our dataset. Then we need to find
the real-world coordinates from the 2D image coordinates.
Now we need to find the number of social distancing
violations, the distance between two pedestrians and social
density 𝛒. Our model uses GoogleNet which is a pretrained
Deep Convolutional Neural Network and is a variant of the
Inception architecture.
 International Electrical and Electronics Engineering Conference (IEEEC-2021)

The experimentation was done on a laptop with an Intel Core
i5-7300HQ CPU, 8 gb RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX
1050Ti CPU.
correspondence between these two was used to determine
critical social density.
From the plotted graph, it can be concluded that there is a
positive relation between the two parameters as when one is
increasing, the other is too.
A simple linear regression was applied on the values of the
above two parameters. The skewness value of the social
density of our data set was 0.193. These results are displayed
in fig 2. Here critical density will be the minimum value of the
predicted range.
Table 3 here tabulates the observed intercepts and critical
density of the regression model. These values also go along
with the pattern of values in the fig 2. This helped us uphold
the success of our technique.

Fig 1: Human detection using our model and the subsequent verification of
physical distancing.

VI. RESULTS
A. Human Detection
Figure 1 shows a random frame from our video dataset after
going through our model, we also have the 2D transformed
image.

Fig 3: Histogram heatmap between social density and mean closest distance.

Fig 2: Graph is the linear regression(red) between social density and frequency
of social distancing violations. Prediction range is signified by green lines and
the critical social density is the x-intercepts of the lines.

B. Distance between individuals

For each pedestrian, we can find the set of humans closer than
the minimum distance required for social distancing by
iterating over all the pedestrians detected and finding the Fig 4: Graph is a histogram heat map between social density and frequency of
social distancing violations. This shows that there is a positive relation
euclidean distance between them. We specify D for each i
between the two parameters.
pedestrian as the closest distance between him and another
pedestrian. We specify the minimum of the set of all D as i

minimum closest distance D . We can also find the average

min

closest distance, D , of a set of D of size n as the sum of all D

avg i i

in the set divided by n. We compare these findings with the

social density and observe that both D and D are relatively
avg min

high when social density is low.

C. Critical Social Density

A histogram was plotted for the values of the social density
and the frequency of social distancing infringements. The
 International Electrical and Electronics Engineering Conference (IEEEC-2021)

VII. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes an Artificial Intelligence based system for
figuring out regions where social distancing is not being
followed. We use social density as a factor for figuring out the
extent of social distancing violation.

There are some pedestrians which the model fails to identify

when they are not properly visible, or they are hidden from
view by another pedestrian. Future work may be done on
increasing pedestrian detection accuracy and on detecting
groups of pedestrians.

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