A pedestrian flow analysis system using Wi-Fi packet sensors to a real environment

Abstract

The authors have been developing the system, which analyzes pedestrian flow using Wi-Fi packet sensors. The sensors collect Wi-Fi packet called probe request packet, which is transmitted from a smartphone to search Wi-Fi access points. In addition, the cloud storage server is running to manage observed packets centrally and to compute pedestrian flow in real time. Additionally, user movement history is vitally important and we have to pay close attention to handling that kind of data. Therefore, the system runs with an anonymization method and a cryptographic function. Some kinds of demonstration experiments were held in real environment. As a result, it was confirmed that we can analyze the rough tendency of pedestrian flow using the present system and simple analysis methods.