Counting people in crowds with a real-time network of simple image sensors

Estimating the number of people in a crowded environment is a central task in civilian surveillance. Most vision-based counting techniques depend on detecting individuals in order to count, an unrealistic proposition in crowded settings. We propose an alternative approach that directly estimates the number of people. In our system, groups of image sensors segment foreground objects from the background, aggregate the resulting silhouettes over a network, and compute a planar projection of the scene's visual hull. We introduce a geometric algorithm that calculates bounds on the number of persons in each region of the projection, after phantom regions have been eliminated. The computational requirements scale well with the number of sensors and the number of people, and only limited amounts of data are transmitted over the network. Because of these properties, our system runs in real-time and can be deployed as an untethered wireless sensor network. We describe the major components of our system, and report preliminary experiments with our first prototype implementation.