A Vision System for Estimating People Flow

Counting the number of people crossing a public area can be very useful for properly scheduling the frequency of a service. Mechanical and photosensitive systems, such as rotating tripod gates, short iron doors, weight-sensitive boards, and photoelectric cells, have often been used for such estimates. Since these methods are not efficient in critical conditions, vision-based approaches have been provided. Many of them identify moving objects through a segmentation process. Once the objects are identified, they are tracked in the sequence of images and counted. These approaches have some drawbacks when they are used in critical conditions such as for counting the people getting on and off a public bus. In this paper, a new technique for counting passing people which is based on motion estimation and spatio-temporal interpretation of the estimated motion is proposed, with its implementation on prototype DSP-based architecture.