Tracking passenger movement with ground-based laser scanner

Abstract: It is important to count the number of passengers or to measure a trajectory of passengers in many fields, such as security of a building, marketing, etc. Various studies are conducted on the methods of counting or tracking passengers. For example, cameras have been mainly used in existing studies, but the disadvantage of using cameras is that geometric parameters like distance and velocity can’t be directly measured. Radar sensors are also used. They can measure distance and velocity, but their viewing angle and angular resolution is very limited. Hence, in this study, among those methods mentioned above, we used laser scanners, whose viewing angle is wide and the angular resolution is high. The goal of our study is to track passengers by laser scanners and evaluate the possibility quantitatively, and as the first step of tracking passengers, we attempted to detect passengers from scanner image data. We developed an algorithm for passenger detection and demonstrated the validity of the algorithm through an experiment.