QueueSense: Collaborative recognition of queuing on mobile phones

Nowadays people spend a substantial amount of time waiting in different places such as supermarkets and amusement parks. Detecting the status of queuing may benefit both users and business. In this paper, we present QueueSense, a queuing recognition system on mobile phones to assist in a queue management system. QueueSense extracts features of queuing behavior and classifies queueing via collaboration among people waiting in line. It measures the disparity of people in different lines using relative position changing rate and partitions different queues using a hierarchical clustering approach. We implement a prototype of QueueSense on Android platforms using widely available multi-modal sensors and it is the first queue detection system on mobile phones. We conduct real-world experiments at a dining hall and a supermarket near a university campus. Through implementation and evaluation, we demonstrate that QueueSense is capable of detecting waiting lines that occur in our daily lives with high accuracy.