Flexible thermal camera solution for Smart city people detection and counting

Abstract

Tourism management plays an important role in the context of Smart Cities. In this work, we have used thermal cameras for the development of an Object Detection solution in pedestrian areas. The solution can classify people, bikes, strollers, and count people in Real-Time by using telephoto and wide-angle thermal cameras, in hot squares where there is a relevant number of people passing by. This work has improved FASTER-R-CNN and YOLOv5 architectures with new data sets and fine-tuning approaches to enhance mean average precision and flexibility whether compared to state of the art solutions. Both top-down and bottom-up training adaptation approaches have been assessed in order to demonstrate that the proposed bottom-up approach can provide better results. Results have overcome the state-of-the-art in terms of mean Average Precision in counting (i) for relevant number of people in the scene (removing the limitation of previous state-of-the-art solutions that were set to provide good precision up to 10 people) and (ii) in terms of flexibility with respect to different kinds of camera and resolutions. The resulting model can produce results also when executed on thermal camera and in Real-Time on industrial PC of mid-level. The proposed solution has been developed and validated in the framework of the Herit-Data EC project and it has exploited the Snap4City platform for the final collection of data results, monitoring and their publication on real time dashboards.

Data Sources and Models for Integrated Mobility and Transport Solutions

“…Traffic sensors (spires, virtual spires, BT sniffer, laser, etc.) are at the basis of any assessment of traffic conditions [ 15 ], such as counting the number of vehicles traveling on the roads (and distinguishing among the different kinds of vehicle), estimating traffic flow, identifying critical conditions and in some cases recognizing car license plates and thus verifying authorization, insurance, computing origin–destination matrices, etc. Other kinds of data are those related to parking sensors, which may communicate slot occupancy [ 16 ], and in some cases also may perform a match with the specific car park slot authorization.…”

“…Information extracted on the edge by the TV CAM processing unit (e.g., the counting) can be transmitted as text messages such as JSON in MQTT/NGSI, thus reducing any privacy issue related to image transmission. Cameras are mainly used to count persons [ 15 , 50 ] or vehicles (in some cases called virtual spires) staying in specific areas or passing through particular gates. Tracking applications to assess mobility patterns is possible by using, for example, person reidentification or car plate reading [ 51 ]; this approach is also used to estimate the average velocity in highway segments and produce tickets.…”

“…Traffic sensors (spires, virtual spires, BT sniffer, laser, etc.) are at the basis of any assessment of traffic conditions [15], such as counting the number of vehicles traveling on the roads (and distinguishing The Sensors Data group includes information coming from the IoT network of sensors that can produce a continuous flow of real-time information. Traffic sensors (spires, virtual spires, BT sniffer, laser, etc.)…”

Smart City Scenario Editor for General What-If Analysis

“…Thanks to the increasing deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the availability of big data, the concept of a smart city is, nowadays, widely applied worldwide to address current and future challenges in the urban context. Indeed, due to increasing urbanization, city councils are called to plan and take actions in several domains like mobility [1,2], urban infrastructure [3], energy [4], security [5,6], environment [7], etc. For example, traffic congestion and related pollution emissions must be reduced, green and sustainable energy sources should be adopted, critical areas should be identified and monitored, and public spaces should be improved to be safer and more accessible.…”