People Counting System Using OpenCV Algorithms and Edge Computing for Safety Management

The necessity of ensuring people's safety in urban conditions during gathering in a certain indoor or outdoor area, as well as during the operation of technical equipment, requires measurement of their number, weights, the distance between them, density and many other parameters. The collection of those parameters and analysis allows you to ensure the optimal numerical value of people per area and not exceed the critical peak value, ensuring the safety of people's health and life. However, automating those processes requires stable network bandwidth and enormous computing resources for data transferring to the data center and its processing, as well as applying artificial intelligence algorithms to the data and sending the results back to the end-user. In this paper, to avoid the disadvantages of cloud computing, we consider Raspberry Pi with a camera module as an edge device to develop an automated people-counting system based on using OpenCV algorithms and Edge Computing for Safety Management. The proposed system can be used for indoor or outdoor areas, during scaffolding works and lift's operation for controlling an optimal number of people. As a result of the application the edge computing, network bandwidth and computing resources of the data center have been optimized.