Automatic Passenger Counting Based On Multi-Objects Recognition

Developing intelligent public traffic system (IPTS) is an effective way to resolve traffic problems. In IPTS automatic passenger counting (APC) is a crucial technology, which can be used to automatically record the number of passengers boarding and alighting at individual bus stops. This paper introduces a new passenger counting technology, which is different from existing APC and is video based capable of addressing the need for automatically counting passengers on congested transit routes with high density passenger boarding and alighting activities. Accurate ridership information obtained from APC will help monitoring transit performance and improving the planning, scheduling and operations of the service.Based on the discussion of ridership information collection and the deeply analysis of existing APC technologies, the architecture of APC system based on multi-objects recognition is brought forward and analyzed in detail, including the module function and key technologies of system realization. Technologies of digital signal processing and digital image processing are the basis of APC, and multi-objects detecting and tracking algorithm is the essential factor to implement it.Comparing with traditional multi-objects detecting and tracking algorithm, a simple algorithm adapted to detect and track boardings and alightings is proposed. In term of moving objects detection, two-step moving objects detection algorithm is introduced. Firstly, a new algorithm of moving objects existing detection based on difference between blocks'average value of gray scale is presented to detect whether moving objects exist. Secondly, some effective approaches are adopted to extract moving objects such as image filtering, image segmentation, morphology processing etc. Besides, a kind of effective and simple thresholding methods for image segmentation is proposed, which adopts fixed threshold associated with adaptive threshold. In term of moving objects tracking, the feature-based tracking approach is adopted and a kind of cost function is improved in the tracking and counting algorithm. Besides, moving characteristics of targets are used to predict the search areas of matching objects. And then, moving state and feature value of objects in current frame are recorded to ensure the continuity of the dynamic tracking depended on object-chain.The APC technology based on multi-objects recognition was tested by capturing field image sequences of passengers getting on and off buses in Route 462, Chongqing,...