A Kinect-based people-flow counting system

Abstract

This paper proposed a bi-directional people-flow counting system with Kinect. It can also be applied to multi-flow to correspond with the demand for the practical application. Firstly, we set the Kinect above the doorway to capture the situation of pedestrian flow. Then this system detects people in the covering area using the depth image information from Kinect system. And we do the morphological processing like erosion to the object and find the region of interest (ROI) often performed on using a mapping-based detection approach. After these previous steps, this system set a detected line and let people go through it. Therefore, we can get people number of the experimental result. For the multi-flow case, it will cause the occlusion problem, so we could apply the depth information to distinguish the target on occlusion problem. Final, we compare the experimental results with the manual count results and other research. Under normal circumstances, our system provides not only almost 100% for bi-directional counting but also correspond with the demand for real-time.