Moving in a crowd: Human perception as a multiscale process

The strategic behaviour of pedestrians is largely determined by how they perceive and react to neighbouring people. This issue is addressed in this paper by a model which combines, in a time and space-dependent way, discrete and continuous effects of pedestrian interactions. Numerical simulations and qualitative analysis suggest that human perception, and its impact on crowd dynamics, can be effectively modelled as a multiscale process based on a dual microscopic/macroscopic representation of groups of agents.