APeC : Automated People Counting from Video

APeC is a video monitoring system that is used to count the number of people passing through a monitored area. A single camera is placed directly above the door to get the clear top view of the people passing with minimum of occlusion. Frames are extracted from video and the pixels of each frame are submitted to a Self-Organizing Map for classification as head or non-head. Connected component analysis is performed on the classified pixels to cluster them into different regions then size constraints are imposed on the regions to eliminate noise. The coordinates of each blob’s centroid are computed to identify its location and to which region the blob belongs (top, middle, or bottom). The Euclidean distance between blobs from the current and previous frames is then computed. A blob from the previous frame will be matched with another blob from the current frame if they have minimum Euclidean distance. Matching blobs represent the same person present in those frames. A particular blob will be counted if and only if it has passed through the three regions consecutively. Experiments show that our system is relatively robust even when there are shadows in the video.