ECC: Passenger Counting in the Elevator Using Commodity WiFi

Abstract

Elevators have become a kind of indispensable facility for everyday life, which bring people both convenience and safety hazards. Specifically in the household environment, an elevator’s lifespan is expected to be more than 20 years. An appropriate and regularly maintained counterweight is conducive to extending elevator life. This paper proposes a passenger counting approach in the elevator for regular counterweight adjustment based on commodity WiFi called ECC. Since the running time of the elevator between two adjacent floors is short, the major challenge of ECC is how to count passengers from the limited captured data. This paper first theoretically analyzes the relationship between the number of passengers and the variation of channel state information (CSI). Then ECC constructs a multi-dimensional feature by extracting the average of amplitude (AOA), time-varying spectrum (TVS), and percentage of non-zero elements (PEM) features from the limited data. Finally, the random forest (RF) classifier is used for passenger counting and the local optimization problem is solved by expanding the feature dataset through data segmentation. ECC is implemented by using off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11n devices, and its performance is evaluated via extensive experiments in typical real-world scenes. The estimated precision of ECC can reach more than 95%, and more than 97% of estimation errors are less than 2 persons, which demonstrates the superior effectiveness and generalizability of ECC.