WiFi-Crowd Spy: A novel crowd-counting system

Currently, there is a requirement in many countries to keep public and work spaces safe due to COVID-19. In fact, indoor spaces must be monitored to control the allowed capacity, which can vary depending on the alert level of a city at a given time. This has motivated some researchers to investigate several technologies to implement methods and strategies to enable the reopening of these spaces in a safe manner. In this paper, we propose a crowd counting detection system that this paper, we propose a crowd counting detection system that addresses the problem of controlling the indoor capacity of offices inside buildings. The proposed solution uses an existing communication technology such as WiFi in order to determine the crowd counting for the indoor environment. In particular, the existing infrastructure consists of two Wireless LAN Controllers (WLC) and several APs deployed in a building, which allows us to estimate the number of people based on the access to Wireless Access Points (APs). Thus, the proposed system takes into account when a mobile device connects/disconnects to the AP to increase or decrease the number of people in a particular office and sends the respective alert to the system administrator when this capacity is about to be exceeded or already surpassed.