People Counting System

Question

I want to develop a "People Counting System" using OpenCV (or Emgu CV).

Please guide me on how to implement or lead me to some examples or open source projects.

(I have done some work: extracting diff then threshold to delete background, using motion history and like that; still no good results.)

Edit 1: I am counting a high people flow (a dozen of them may come through simultaneously).

Edit 2: It must be at least 80% accurate. People are walking through a door that is almost 5 meters wide. The problem is I have no control on the position or angle of the camera. Camera is shouting the place from a 10m distance at a 2.5m height.

Thank you

Answer 1

If you call a people counting system a system that counts people that are in a room then I recommend you implement the hardware with a microcontroller with 2 lazers(normal lazer toys work) and 2 photoresistors.For the microcontroller I recomen you use Arduino.And then make an C# application that has a SerialPort object and reads the data that the arduino sends through the USB.The arduino will send 1 for "someone entered the room" and 0 for "someone left the room" for example.Then the logging and statistics can be done easily in C#.

Arduiono Site:here

Photoresistor for $1: here

This solution is alot cheaper and easyer to implement than using a camera that is with a fairly good quality.

Hope I helped you.

Answer 2

Check out the HOG pedestrian detector that comes with recent versions of OpenCV (>= 2.2).

See modules/objdetect/src/hog.cpp and samples/cpp/peopledetect.cpp in the OpenCV sources. Unfortunately there is no official documentation about it yet.

Answer 3

This would help you to count moving things including people: Motion Detection project on CodeProject

Answer 4

Are people the only kind of "entities" in the scene? If this is not the case, do you care about considering a person some other kind of thing that moves through the scene? Because if that is the case, you could just count blobs that come in or come out from the scene. It may sound a bit naive but I will take some kind of motion image, group motion pixels by distance in clusters. Your distance metric could take into account some restrictions, such as that people will "often" stand so pixels in a cluster should group around some kind of regression line (an straight-up line if the camera is aligned with de floor). It shouldn't be necessary to track them in the scene, just noticing when they enter or they leave, though you'd get some issues with, for example, people entering on their own in the scene and leaving in pairs or in groups... Good luck :)