Automatic People Counting System Using Aerial Image Captured by Drone for Event Management

Abstract

Event management refers to the ability to apply project management skills in order to initiate large scale social or business events. Hence, it requires the use of organizational as well as business management skills to envision, plan, and finally execute any such event. Therefore, to count or estimate the number of people who attend such events is one of important tool in event management. In common, counting number of people in events can be done by counting manually traditional headcount system. Nevertheless, this process or technique consumes much time and is also a difficult task to execute for a considerable number of people or a bigger crowd. Therefore, a modern counting system like automatic people counting system is developed to enhance the process of counting people. Thus, various method of counting has been proposed in the past decades. Consequently, automatic counting people using digital image processing technique is introduced to overcome this problem. Thus, to monitor or to count the number of people can be done by using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drones. The use of drones can take a broader picture, saving time and becoming more efficient. For this research, the DJI Mavic Pro Drone is used to scout the areas. This paper is focusing on counting the number of people images. Thus, the images are firstly compared between RGB and HSV colour model. Then, the HSV colour model has been chosen for the thresholding process. Here, the images are compared between Otsu thresholding and manual thresholding. Both thresholding method gives a good segmentation result, but Otsu’s method is chosen because of its higher accuracy. Moreover, noise removal technique is employed in order to get good smoothing performance and produce better counting results. This paper is fully developed with MATLAB R2013a software. This technique has proven to be a good image processing technique with total accuracy of 91%. The hardware system is also developed to transmit the counting results.KeywordsUnmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)Matrix Laboratories (MATLAB)Graphical User Interface (GUI)Red, Green, Blue (RGB)Hue, Saturation, Value (HSV)