Experimental Study on the Influence of Step Phase in Pedestrian Movement

There is a fundamentalLiu, Chi relationshipSong, Weiguo between the headwayLo, Siuming and velocity in pedestrian dynamics; this is of great importance in building a pedestrian movement model. However, it is found that even if experiment conditions are strictly controlled, the velocity of pedestrians with the same headway varies considerably. This implies that states of pedestrians should be considered thoroughly, and its influence to macroscopic parameters needs to be quantified. A single-file pedestrian movement experiment is carried out to analyse the microscopic moving characteristics of pedestrians. The trajectories of participants in a straight passageway are extracted through an image processing method based on a mean-shift algorithm. The transverse swing of trajectories is correlated with the phase of pedestrians’ steps period. The stride length and frequency of pedestrians are collected from the trajectories. Besides, the synchronisation of the lock-step group varies during the movement. The findings can give the stop-and-go phenomenon a new microscopic explanation. This study can be used to evaluate pedestrian microscopic movement and the development of evacuation models.