A High-Accuracy, Cost-Effective People Counting Solution Based on Visual Depth Data

Seyed Ali Hosseini Shamoushaki1 Mohammad Mostafa Talebi2 AminehMazandarani3S. Jafar Hosseini
The 11th Iranian and the first International Conference on Machine Vision and Image Processing (MVIP 2020)

Abstract

Real-time people counting has become a critical task due to its applications in a wide range of areas such as security, safety, statistics and commerce, implying that the demand for systems that offer such a capability has risen. Consequently, it is important to make it possible for the public to afford a precise, robust people counting system. Therefore, we aim to propose an efficient solution that requires low-cost hardware. Hopefully the people counting product derived from this solution will have a reasonable purchase price when put up for sale. Following the minimal hardware requirement, our system only relies on a depth camera plus a cheap embedded processor. A detection/tracking module forms the core of the underlying theoretical approach whose main functionality is to detect and count any entry/exit occurences through a generic entrance. Our testing and validation experiments reveal that the proposed system yields a highly satisfatory accuracy rate and can compete closely with similar technologies currently available on the market.

Keywords: People Counting, Time-of-Flight Sensor, Template Matching, Kalman Filter