Abstract
Recently, the importance of understanding the number of people and the flow of the persons at public accommodation or department stores have increased more and more. This information is useful for congestion reducing, efficient promotion of the institution management and sales improvement, etc. The conventional methods of counting number of people are carried out by human viewing and by a machine of rotary stick-type counter. Therefore, we have already proposed an automatic system for counting number of people by the image processing to use a straight measurement line and a space-time image. However, these methods are not suitable for the counting at a wide place. In this paper, we propose a method of counting multidirection passer-by by using circular space-time image. In this method, a circular measurment line is set on a sequence of the background subtraction images. All pixels on this line is transformed to the space-time image. The number of passer-by can be counted by using this space-time image. But the direction information of passer-by cannot be obtained from this space-time image. Therefore, two circular measurment lines are set on a sequence of the background subtraction images. Two space-time images are generated from the outside line and the inside line. The directions of passer-by can be obtained by detecting which line passer-by passed previously.
