Evaluation of the Use of Wi-Fi Probes to Produce A Human Detection System

Abstract

There are many places of interest that do not have information on the number of people visiting, leaving, and the amount of time that they stayed for. In Thailand, there are over 5,000 registered historical sites, many of which have no guards or conservators. Because of this, records of visitors are not kept. Being able to collect and analyze such data would be a useful tool for planning, but these data are hard to automatically acquire in a cost-effective way. This paper evaluates the possibility of building a system from commodity hardware that is capable of collecting data from Wi-Fi probe signals that are sent by visitor's devices to determine the number of visitors and the amount of time they stayed at the destination. The evaluations focus on three parameters, signal range, signal strength, and power consumption. The results show that the Wi-Fi probe collection system has advantages in terms of coverage range, and low power consumption. In addition, location and direction estimation from signal strength with three sensors, and error reduction techniques are also evaluated. This system is suitable to be used as a budget preliminary data collection device.