Directional People Counter Based on Head Tracking

This paper presents an application for counting people through a single fixed camera. This system performs the count distinction between input and output of people moving through the supervised area. The counter requires two steps: detection and tracking. The detection is based on finding people´s heads through preprocessed image correlation with several circular patterns. Tracking is made through the application of a Kalman filter to determine the trajectory of the candidates. Finally, the system updates the counters based on the direction of the trajectories. Different tests using a set of real video sequences taken from different indoor areas give results ranging between 87% and 98% accuracies depending on the volume of flow of people crossing the counting zone. Problematic situations, such as occlusions, people grouped in different ways, scene luminance changes, etc., were used to validate the performance of the system.