A counting method of the number of passing people using a stereo camera

Attempts to count the passing people by image processing have been made for some time. However, the conventional methods could not count the passing people accurately unless there were very few people passing through the gate at one time. In this paper, the authors propose an automatic method of counting passing people by using a stereo camera. In the 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 can be observed from just overhead. In this system arrangement, if there are a crowd of people in the gate, then the data of the passing people are not overlapped 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, the authors show some experimental results obtained by using a simple experimental system to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method