Automatic Estimation of Pedestrian Flow

Counting the amount of pedestrian flow is an important task for video surveillance applications. Most previous methods for pedestrian flow counting employed model-based detection or top-view cameras to measure pedestrian flow. However, those approaches are difficult to apply to realistic applications because of high complexity or specific camera set up. In this paper, a pixel count based method is proposed for pedestrian flow estimation. In the proposed method, image features such as foreground pixels and motion vectors are utilized as clues to find the number of people going through a gate. To estimate the number of pedestrians without any modeling or tracking, the number of foreground pixels is accumulated on the gate. Experiments on the PETS2006 dataset revealed that the proposed method can count the number of pedestrians successfully even for viewpoint changes.