A study of pedestrian observation system with ultrasonic distance sensor

A measurement of the pedestrian traffic becomes a key issue for supporting guidance of safety and for investigating a viewer´s evaluation of an advertisement in a shopping district. In this paper, in order to measure the pedestrian traffic, we propose a new pedestrian observation system using ultrasonic distance sensors. From an experimental evaluation in a shopping street, we have confirmed that the proposed system accurately detects a trend of the pedestrian traffic. Moreover, we have concluded that the proposed system can estimate the congestion of the shopping street from the number of pedestrians derived from sensor data. Furthermore, we have confirmed that the proposed system can estimate the attention level of digital signage programs by using sensor data. The attention level can be utilized for improving the contents of the digital signage.