A method of counting the passing people by using the stereo images

The attempts to count the passing people by the image processing have been made some time ago. But the conventional methods could not count the passing people accurately unless there were very few of the passing people through the gate at one time. In this paper, we propose that passing people be accurately counted using images obtained by a stereo camera. In proposed method, the stereo camera is hung from the ceiling of the gate and the optical axis of the camera is set up so that the passing people could be observed from just overhead. In this system arrangement, if there are crowd people in the gate, then the data of the passing people are not overlapped each other on the obtained images. In addition, by using the stereo camera, the human region and road region on the obtained images are able to be segmented accurately, In this paper, we show some experimental results obtained by using a simple experimental system to verify effectiveness of the proposed method.