Real-Time People Counting system using Video Camera

A people counter is a device used to count the number of pedestrians walking through a door or corridor. Most of the time, this system is used at the entrance of a building so that the total number of visitors can be recorded. People counting system is important for marketing research (pedestrian traffic management, tourists flow estimation) or in security application (in the case of an evacuation, it is essential to know how many people are inside the building at any given time). Some sensors are used to count people in a building with different advantages and drawbacks and different accuracy such as laser beam, infra-red sensor, thermal sensor and recently video camera. In the literature overview, it was found that the most reliable and accurate sensor was the video camera but it was also the most expensive and heavy on computing. Several papers have been published this last ten years for counting (or tracking) people by using video processing with different methods (extraction of the pedestrian silhouette, make rectangular patches with a certain behaviour, mounting the camera vertically to avoid occlusion problem, segmentation of human region by using stereo video camera). The aim of this thesis was to make a prototype of a real-time counting people system video based by using the Matlab-Simulink programming tool. And then try to measure its accuracy and compare to another system based on laser beam sensors. And finally, conclude in which situations this system is more reliable and therefore find its advantages and drawbacks.