A people counting system for business analytics

This paper deals with people counting in stores for business analytics using stereo vision. Among the several problems in this type of applications, two are the most relevant for our purposes: the management of occlusions and the distinction between adult people (potential customers) and other objects (children, trolleys, strollers, animals, etc.). The proposed solution uses a novel approach for object detection (based on background suppression on a so-called “depth bird-eye view” and the clustering on the 3D point cloud by means of mean shift with a cylindrical kernel) followed by an adult people classifier which exploits a fitness measure with respect to a cylindrical human body model. The fitness is computed using Montecarlo sampling to estimate the volume occupation. Experiments are conducted on two real setups (including a store in a normal day of activity) and compared with a previous work. The results demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed solution.