Headcount

This project aims to create an electronic people-counting system for large, indoor events at Arizona State University (ASU). Initially, the project will target  ASU’s Engineering Career Fair, which must maintain accurate counts of the number of people in each Memorial Union (MU) room to ensure no room exceeds the fire occupancy limit. Currently, ASU employs student volunteers to manually track the number of people in a given room with hand counters. This manual method of counting individuals in a room can be error prone and inefficient. Hence, this project seeks to increase people-counting accuracy at ASU events, increase the availability of room data to ASU safety officials, and provide a mobile system that can be easily deployed on a per-need basis.

To achieve these three goals, this project proposes establishing a daisy chain network of thermal imaging cameras equipped with AI to monitor each room. Each sensor module will count the people entering or leaving the room and communicate the data through the daisy chain to a central server. The server will compile the data and publish to an interface such as a web browser or a mobile application for easy viewing. This will allow ASU’s safety officials to instantly see accurate headcounts in real time. The current approach is to develop the sensor unit using a Raspberry Pi and an infrared camera. The sensor forwards its data to the Raspberry Pi, and the computer processes the data, updates its room count, and transmits its room count to the server. The server computer will also be a Raspberry Pi, and it will handle all traffic from the sensor-clients and display-clients. ASU security will have a desktop and mobile client program to query this server’s data. Work-to-date includes sensor and camera research, ultrasonic sensor and thermal camera prototyping, server setup, client request testing, and display prototyping.

Team Members:

William Alber, Sophomore, Aerospace Engineering

Thomas Duke, Senior, Computer Systems Engineering

 Chandler Hutchens, Freshman, Aerospace Engineering

Nicholas Iwanski, Junior, Electrical Engineering

Alyssa Lim, Sophomore, Computer Systems Engineering

Molly Luther, Junior, Computer Science

Seth Mazza, Sophomore, Aerospace Engineering

Juan Rayos De La Rosa, Freshman, Computer Science

 

Community Partner: Amanda L. Hoyt, Chemical Safety Specialist, Fulton Schools of Engineering

Others Involved: Lauren Majure,Employer Relations, Fulton Schools Career Center