  It is common for CCTV operators to overlook inter- esting events taking place
within the crowd due to large number of people in the crowded scene (i.e.
marathon, rally). Thus, there is a dire need to automate the detection of
salient crowd regions acquiring immediate attention for a more effective and
proactive surveillance. This paper proposes a novel framework to identify and
localize salient regions in a crowd scene, by transforming low-level features
extracted from crowd motion field into a global similarity structure. The
global similarity structure representation allows the discovery of the
intrinsic manifold of the motion dynamics, which could not be captured by the
low-level representation. Ranking is then performed on the global similarity
structure to identify a set of extrema. The proposed approach is unsupervised
so learning stage is eliminated. Experimental results on public datasets
demonstrates the effectiveness of exploiting such extrema in identifying
salient regions in various crowd scenarios that exhibit crowding, local
irregular motion, and unique motion areas such as sources and sinks.
