Cloud-based people counter

Abstract

Emergence of Industry 4.0 in current economic trend promotes the usage of Internet of Things (IoT) in product development. Counting people on streets or at entrances of places is indeed beneficial for security, tracking and marketing purposes. The usage of cameras or closed-circuit television (CCTV) for surveillance purposes has emerged the need of tools for the digital imagery content analysis to improve the system. The purpose of this project is to design a cloud-based people counter using Raspberry Pi embedded system and send the received data to ThingSpeak, IoT platform. The initial stage of the project is simulation and coding development using OpenCV and Python. For the hardware development, a Pi camera is used to capture the video footage and monitor the people movement. Raspberry Pi acts as the microcontroller for the system and process the video to perform people counting. Experiment have been conducted to measure the performance of the system in the actual environment, people counting on saved video footage and visualized the data on ThingSpeak platform.