An Intelligent RGB-D Video System for Bus Passenger Counting.

The information of the number of passengers getting in/off a vehicle is very important for public bus transport companies. In fact, the operators need to estimate the number of travellers using their vehicles for marketing purposes, for evaluating transit service capacities and allocating the proper number of buses for each connection-line. The goal of this work is to provide a system for counting and monitoring passengers, both adults and children, at the entrance of bus. This system is mainly based on an RGB-D sensor, located over each bus door, and image processing and understanding software. The RGB image could be affected by a high luminescence sensibility, whereas depth data allow a greater reliability and accuracy in people counting. The correctness and effectiveness of our method has been confirmed by experiments conducted in a real scenario. Furthermore, this approach has the advantage of being computationally inexpensive and flexible enough to obtain, in real time, statistical measures on the amount of people present in the bus, with the use of an Analytical Processing System (a separate process) that accesses the data stored in the database and extracts statistical data and knowledge about the bus passengers.