Sensing Thousands of Visitors Using Radio Frequency

Abstract

The majority of radio frequency crowd estimation systems are tested with at most a few tens of human individuals. At the same time, they are particularly useful for crowd safety management for events with hundreds or thousands of visitors. We deployed our passive crowd estimation system in two environments at a 400 000-visitor music festival. This paper describes our system's architecture and compares our results to those of an access control system. We found a correlation coefficient of 0.97 between our system and the access control system. Additionally, we show that we can estimate the crowd size correctly up to a few hundred individuals. A system such as ours can provide a direct objective measurement to security personnel who are currently making estimates under stress and influenced by experience, view angle, and occlusions.