Festival of Lights in Lyon

 

The Festival of Lights in Lyon is an open-air event attracting each year nearly two million visitors over four days. As part of the MADRAS project, we are collecting videos of crowded scenes during the Festival of Lights. We have identified crowded places from previous festivals where complex dynamics of dense pedestrian flows are to be expected. The crowds are filmed from a top view using selected surveillance cameras of the city of Lyon and cameras installed for the MADRAS project on the balconies of pre-identified apartments.


The aim is to extract pedestrian dynamics measurements such as visitor trajectories or aggregated measures of crowd density, flow, or average speed. These data are intended to calibrate and test the pedestrian models and algorithms developed in the framework of the MADRAS project. Selected scenes of the Festival of Lights are also used as reference scenarios for numerical simulations. The collection of crowd videos is done in the strict respect of the privacy and personal data protection of the filmed visitors. The videos are processed anonymously, without distinguishing the filmed persons by any criteria. All pedestrian dynamics data (as well as the models and simulation software) will be publicly available at the end of the project.

 

The data collection is done in agreement and cooperation with the technical organisation commitee of the Festival of Lights as well as project management department of the city of Lyon, whom we gratefully acknowledge. Further information about the video collection are available here:

 

Up to 7,000 pedestrian trajectories were collected over areas of up to several hundred square metres, at densities of up to 3 pedestrians per square metre.

We are currently writing a data paper where the full dataset will be made publicly available - more information will follow soon.

Some of the trajectory data can already be downloaded and visualised at madras-data-app.streamlit.app.

 

 

Figure:  Four places in Lyon where problems happened during the Festival of Lights 2021.

 


                 

                             Figure:  Emplacement of some cameras for the video recording during the Festival of Lights 2022.           Figure:  Installation of a camera on the City Hall

                                                                                                                                                                              of Lyon for the Festival of Lights 2022.

 

 

Figure:  Some pictures taken during the Festival of Lights in Lyon.