An Intelligent People-Flow Counting Method for Passing Through a Gate

Based on area and color analyses, a cost-effective bi-directional people counter dedicated to the pedestrian flow passing through a gate or a door is proposed. Firstly, the passing people are roughly counted with the area of people projected on an image captured by a zenithal video camera. The moving direction of the pedestrian can be recognized by tracking each people-pattern with an analysis of its HSI histogram. To improve the accuracy of counting, the color vector extracted from the quantized histograms of intensity or hue is introduced to refine the early counting. Besides, the inherent problems of both people touching together and merge/split phenomenon can be overcome. Experimental results show that an 100% accuracy of bidirectional counting can be achieved if the people number of a people-touching pattern is less than six