An automatic bi-directional passing-people counting method based on color image processing

Based on color image processing, an automatic bidirectional counting method of pedestrians through a gate is proposed. In the developed technique, one color video camera is hung from the ceiling of the gate with a directly downward view so that the passing people will be observed from just overhead. Firstly, the passing people is roughly counted with the area of people in an image. The moving direction of the pedestrian can be oriented by tracking each people pattern through analyzing its HSI histogram. With features extracted from the quantized histograms of I (intensity) or H (hue), the first counting can be refined. Experimental results show that an 100% accuracy of bidirectional counting can be achieved in the case of multiple isolated one-person patterns and the same accuracy can be also obtained unless the people number of a multiple-person pattern is over five.