An embedded system for counting passengers in public transportation vehicles

This article describes a system for people counting conceived for public transportation vehicles. The underlying idea is to monitor the number of passengers getting in or out public transportation means like buses and metros over time hence computing reliable estimations in order to improve vehicle's door control. A stereo vision system is presented, it has been developed considering its future installation over bus doors; a feature based people counting algorithm and an object tracking system are used to count people getting in or out of a specific region of interest. The system here described will be installed and tested on an Ivecobus Citelis vehicle in the framework of the Italian Industria 2015 Ecoautobus initiative.

I. Introduction

People counting is a task attracting a great interest in several fields: the most important ones concern safety related issues but it also proves useful for economic reasons (specifically regarding marketing). Presently the most common approaches for people counting in the public transportation context rely on mechanical interaction, like in case of turnstiles. This kind of systems show important limitations like slowness and a continuous maintenance need (because of their mechanical nature).