[hackerspaces] Looking for video recording of protests/crowds for testing crowd-counting algorithms

[Yves Quemener]

Hello everyone,
I am looking for video recordings of big crowds (ideally protests) in 
order to test various crowd-counting algorithms.

We had protests here in France recently and the differences between 
police estimation and organizers estimation is unacceptably high (14 000 
vs 120 000). Exploring the possibilities for a provable automated or 
semi-automated count seems like a logical consequence for that. Both 
sides are using approximations and multiply an estimated density by an 
estimated area. Wouldn't it be possible to give a count of individuals ? 
Various algorithms are promising for this (like this one : 
http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/Crowds/).

Therefore I would be very interested if someone could help me find 
recordings of protests. It doesn't have to be free of rights, I am 
willing to agree with restrictive licenses as I know that privacy can be 
an issue on this kind of pictures (the license has to authorize research 
use and open source software creation, though). I am interested in any 
kind of video, but here is the ideal recording :
- recording of a protest where the crowd is at least 10 persons wide
- fixed view (not handheld)
- long enough so that most people in the first frame have passed by the 
camera and are not visible anymore in the last frame
- Angle : either vertical enough so that one can see the ground 
(vertical camera on a balcony) or facing the crowd (the typical picture 
angle that journalists use to give a sense of the depth of the protest)
- high definition : the higher the resolution, the better. If the head 
of a person is not at least a few pixels wide, it will be hard to count.
- Without too much compression artifacts (either with a good quality 
compression or uncompressed)

This list of criterions is almost impossible to fulfill I fear, so I am 
interested in any video that fits at least one criterion. I will try to 
make some recordings on rush hour in strategic places, but a protest 
moves differently than a rush-hour crowd. Comments and advices are of 
course more than welcomed. And if someone heard about a project with 
similar goals, please let me know !

Iv