As population control in public areas has become more than necessary worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic, crowd counting results can provide a solid basis for population control. Crowd counting is widely used in social activities to count participants for automated public monitoring such as surveillance and traffic control. It is particularly prominent due to its specific significance to social security and development.
Figure 1: Crowd counting demo at HKSTP
In the past, crowd counting was conducted by manually counting the flow of people passing by to get the total number of participants on site. Due to the crowd’s nature – high density and mobility, estimating the number of people was tough before computer-aid technology developed. Recently, more customized AI systems can carry out repetitive and time-consuming tasks without almost any human intervention or supervision. Now, Anavision is offering an optimized solution for crowd counting, which can be used by anyone. Unlike other object detection solutions, Anavision crowd counting aims to recognize arbitrarily sized targets in various situations including sparse and cluttering scenes at the same time.
The developed crowd counting system has the following features:
- Identify and count the number of people entering and exiting the site.
- Display and record the tracks of the participants.
- Provide notification to the centralized system when the population exceeds the established threshold and other log information.
The above demo video shows the result of the preliminary design of the crowd counting system. The entire screen scene was cut into two parts by the color zones, the upper part represents the off-site area, and the lower one represents the on-site area. The number of people who enter or exit the site was recorded continuously and displayed on the screen. At the same time, the tracks of the crowd are represented in different color dots for better visualization.
This AI-based intelligent crowd counting solution helps eliminate enormous manual work on-site and provides a reliable real-time statistical result. The automatic population tracking function allows statistics of population activities and prevents unauthorized people from entering the constrained area. Moreover, the clients can deploy the system to other sites with minimal coding efforts.
