SmartEvacTrak: A people counting and coarse-level localization solution for efficient evacuation of large buildings

Efficient evacuation of large buildings which seat more than twenty thousand people is a major challenge for building management authorities. Although many enterprise buildings have access control to count those entering various areas, such controls need to be switched off at times of emergency to avoid people getting trapped at a particular location. Hence, counting people during evacuation remains largely manual and error prone. Also, last known location based on access control from business management systems can be erroneous due to issues like tail gating. Accurate people counters like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) often prove costly in large deployments. In this paper we present “SmartEvacTrak”, a low-cost evacuation system which can count people entering and exiting with over 98% accuracy and can also localize people at a coarse level with around 97% accuracy, from results obtained from an evacuation experiment performed on a set of 350+ people randomly exiting a building.