people_counter.avi

Marketing researches are area where required to analyze a lot of data. E.g. we want to understand how many people are visiting a bank. In order to count this value, we need to count each man or woman which are entering to or exiting from the bank. For resolving this task there are a lot of approaches: e.g. use special gate with laser or mechanical counter. Though there are people counting tasks where such approaches cannot work or too unuseful. E.g. barrier cannot be used where people flow is very high, and laser counters have limitations as well.

Opposite the approaches above, we found papers where top-mounted camera is used for resolving the people counting task.

 The fact is that most of organization have own IP or CCTV camera based security infrastructure. And also often there is a camera which is already top-mounted. Thus top-mounted camera counting approach is looked very perspective from reusing infrastructure point of view.

We researched a lot of approaches. There are a lot of ready methods for people counting with top-mounted camera. But such methods either are patented or don’t meet our expectation in quality or speed. Thus we developed own method (see demo video).

Method counts human each time they cross a predefined counting line (that is why it is often called as “line-crossing”). The assumption is that the line should be selected orthogonally to the main people flow.

Now we skip implementation details of the method. If shortly, our method is a real time 15 fps+, we tested it usual USB or IP cameras. We tested our method in indoor and outdoor use-case and the quality is 80-90% (dependent on environment condition).

Our method can be used in other applications, e.g. vehicle counting, you could look at the video how it works. Have a nice watching…