Measurement of people using range image sensor

The traffic flow information of humans and objects is widely put to use as infrastructural information in urban planning such as traffic plans or area marketing. However, traffic flow information depends on the questionnaire survey of the public transportation users or the visual inspection by the inspector on a street corner, causing a problem of costing a lot of money. Therefore, studies have been conducted to automatically measure traffic flow information using a laser beam sensor or a digital video camera. The former method using the laser beam sensor makes it possible to perform a traffic survey of a movable body with high precision in any environment. However, it is impossible to obtain information of its appearance and thus grasp correct attribute information of the movable body itself. On the other hand, with the latter method using the digital video camera, information about the appearance of the movable body can be obtained and analyzed. However, there is a problem that the measurement precision decreases when the photographic environment changes such as in lighting and sunshine, or under such environment as occlusion occurs due to the overlapping of movable bodies. Thus, this research realizes accurate measurement and acquisition of human flow information with attribute information even under difficult photographic environment or where occlusion occurs, by focusing only on human figures and using a range image sensor to which the characteristics of the laser beam sensor and digital video camera are added.