Crowd Counting Using Wireless Infrared Distance Sensors for Indoor Environments

Abstract

Indoor crowd counting has wide applications in various areas, such as security surveillance, estimating customer flows in shopping malls and monitoring occupancy in public transport systems. Many existing counting techniques rely on video cameras or RFID system, which can be too intrusive or too expensive to implement. In this chapter, we introduce a nonintrusive, low-cost, and easy-to-deploy crowd counting method for indoor environments, using off-the-shelf infrared distance sensors and wireless motes. Its nonintrusive nature makes the proposed method more adoptable under circumstances with privacy concerns. The collected signal is processed locally in the wireless motes to reduce the network overhead. The detection result is transmitted back to the base station through the ZigBee wireless radio in the motes. The proposed approach achieved an average detection accuracy of 95 % in the experiments, which shows that it is a highly practical approach for the indoor environments.