Crowd estimation at a social event using call data records

Segregating attendees of the event from other regular visitor, paves way for new applications such as measuring event success and outdoor advertising. Traditional methods of crowd estimation at points of interests such as shopping malls, cinema halls, stadium and exhibitions using sample analysis of visitor through participant count obtained by number of tickets sold. In unstructured (free-to-view) event, the above said method does not help in accurate crowd estimation and social analysis. The objective of this paper is using call data records to estimate the crowd at an unstructured event in a city. The study was conducted at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus, Bengaluru on a special event day. To avoid breach of privacy, anonymised call data records have been used. The crowd estimated using call data records shows positive correlation with ground truth-value.