People Counter with Area Occupancy Control for Covid-19

Governments have imposed social distancing regulations to counter the coronavirus pandemic An automated occupancy control system to provide a more cost-effective and efficient way to abide with these safety regulations With the generalization of the use of digital images, the analysis of movement in video sequences has proved to be an essential tool for various applications such as video surveillance, robotics etc The advance in video processing algorithms and the fast computational capability, give a possibility to use a video tracking and counting people in real time Estimating the number of people in real time is useful information for several applications such as security and health management With the COVID-19 pandemic, the counting of people present in a region of interest is important to control the area occupancy in order to minimize human virus transmission In this paper we present a finished solution for counting people present in the same area The system is based on Raspberry Pi and a common camera The method called BLOB (Binary Large Object) analysis is used The performance of the system, achieving an average count rate between 95% and 98% © 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG