Counting People in Groups

Cameras are becoming a common tool for automated vision purposes due to their low cost. In an era of growing security concerns, camera surveillance systems have become not only important but also necessary. Algorithms for several tasks such as detecting abandoned objects and tracking people have already been successfully developed. While tracking people is relatively easy, counting people in groups is much more challenging. The mutual occlusions between people in a group make it difficult to provide an exact count. The aim of this work is to present a method of estimating the number of people in group scenarios. Several considerations for counting people are illustrated in this paper, and experimental results of the method are described and discussed.