Over the last several years there has been a growing interest in developing computational methodologies for modeling and analyzing movements and behaviors of 'crowds' of people. This interest spans several scientific areas that includes Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Pedestrian Evacuation Dynamics. Despite the fact that these different scientific fields are trying to model the same physical entity (i.e. a crowd of people), research ideas have evolved independently. As a result each discipline has developed techniques and perspectives that are characteristically their own. The goal of this book is to provide the readers a comprehensive map towards the common goal of better analyzing and synthesizing the pedestrian movement in dense, heterogeneous crowds. The book is organized into different parts that consolidate various aspects of research towards this common goal, namely the modeling, simulation, and visual analysis of crowds. Through this book, readers will see the common ideas and vision as well as the different challenges and techniques, that will stimulate novel approaches to fully grasping "crowds."

This anthology is based on the First ACM Workshop on Applied Computational Geometry, WACG '96, held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, in May 1996, as part of the FCRC Conference.
Today, CG is in transition and applied computational geometry has established itself as a fertile meeting ground for theorists from core computational geometry and practitioners from the potential application areas to exchange their ideas and identify issues of common interest. The book presents 11 invited contributions and state-of-the-art reports by leading experts together with 12 refereed full papers selected from 32 submissions. It points the way towards geometrical engineering and addresses researchers and professionals sharing an interest in geometric algorithms and techniques and their use in computational sciences and engineering.