People Counting in a Public Event—Use Case: Free-to-Ride Bus

In the case of traditional bus travel, there are many ways to gather statistics on bus passengers. Paid tickets can directly contain information about the stop at which the passengers came aboard and where they got off. Alternatively, stamping or reading travel cards can be used to obtain similar statistics. In the case of a free-to-ride bus service, these simple methods are generally not available. Yet, for further route and capacity planning, producing exact - or at least informative - statistics is crucial. This paper presents a real-life use case of collecting statistics about bus passengers on a free-to-ride bus route at a large public event in the summer of 2018 in Pori, Finland. The use case utilized cost-effective and off-the-shelf components such as the Raspberry Pi 3 computer, position sensors, cameras, and the Open Source Computer Vision Library version 3. The hardware and software components of the system, which was based on image analysis and shape detection, as well the results of the study, are explained in this paper. Furthermore, this paper presents a discussion on the challenges faced while developing and implementing the system.