CrowdEstimator: Approximating Crowd Sizes with Multi-modal Data for Internet-of-Things Services

TL;DR

This paper presents CrowdEstimator, a multi-modal IoT system combining Wi-Fi data and stereoscopic cameras to accurately estimate crowd sizes in real-world environments, improving accuracy over Wi-Fi-only methods.

Contribution

It introduces calibration algorithms that leverage camera data to enhance Wi-Fi-based crowd estimation, enabling more reliable and shareable results across IoT systems.

Findings

Calibration reduces estimation errors by 43.68% on average.

Cameras achieve at least 85% accuracy in near ground-truth detection.

System successfully deployed in indoor and outdoor pilot studies.

Abstract

Crowd mobility has been paid attention for the Internet-of-things (IoT) applications. This paper addresses the crowd estimation problem and builds an IoT service to share the crowd estimation results across different systems. The crowd estimation problem is to approximate the crowd size in a targeted area using the observed information (e.g., Wi-Fi data). This paper exploits Wi-Fi probe request packets ("Wi-Fi probes" for short) broadcasted by mobile devices to solve this problem. However, using only Wi-Fi probes to estimate the crowd size may result in inaccurate results due to various environmental uncertainties which may lead to crowd overestimation or underestimation. Moreover, the ground-truth is unavailable because the coverage of Wi-Fi signals is time-varying and invisible. This paper introduces auxiliary sensors, stereoscopic cameras, to collect the near ground-truth at a specified calibration choke point. Two calibration algorithms are proposed to solve the crowd estimation problem. The key idea is to calibrate the Wi-Fi-only crowd estimation based on the correlations between the two types of data modalities. Then, to share the calibrated results across systems required by different stakeholders, our system is integrated with the FIWARE-based IoT platform. To verify the proposed system, we have launched an indoor pilot study in the Wellington Railway Station and an outdoor pilot study in the Christchurch Re:START Mall in New Zealand. The large-scale pilot studies show that stereoscopic cameras can reach minimum accuracy of 85\% and high precision detection for providing the near ground-truth. The proposed calibration algorithms reduce estimation errors by 43.68% on average compared to the Wi-Fi-only approach.