Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea of counting people coming in and out of a store. You know, like a visitor tracker. It’s something I thought could be useful for, like, a small business owner, maybe a friend who runs a shop. I wanted to see if I could build something simple and automatic.
Getting Started
First, I needed a camera. I just used an old webcam I had lying around. Nothing fancy, just something to capture video. Then, I figured I’d use my computer to do all the processing. I’m no coding expert, but I’m pretty comfortable with Python, so that’s what I went with.
I did some digging online and found this thing called OpenCV. It’s basically a library, a toolbox, for computer vision stuff. It seemed like it had all the bits and pieces I’d need to detect people in a video feed.
The Messy Part: Coding
So, I started playing around with OpenCV. I followed some tutorials online, mostly just copy-pasting code to see what would happen. It took a lot of trial and error, to be honest. Lots of crashing and weird errors.
The basic idea is this:
- Grab the video: First, I had to get OpenCV to read the video from the webcam.
- Look for People Use some of the detection method provided by the openCV. I didn’t code the detection part on my own.
- Find people-shaped things: Then, I used something called a “HOG detector” (Histogram of Oriented Gradients – sounds fancy, but I just used it). It’s basically a pre-trained thing that looks for human-like shapes in the video frames.
- Draw boxes: When the detector found something that looked like a person, I had it draw a little box around it on the screen.
- Keep track: Then came the tricky part – actually counting people. I had to figure out how to tell if a person was entering or exiting. I did this by basically drawing an imaginary line across the video feed. If a box crossed the line in one direction, I’d add one to the “in” count. If it crossed in the other direction, I’d add one to the “out” count.
Tweaking and Headaches
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Sometimes it would count the same person twice, or miss someone completely. The lighting made a big difference. If it was too dark, or too bright, it would mess up. I spent a lot of time adjusting the position of the camera and messing with the settings in the code.
I also added a little display on the screen that showed the “in” and “out” counts. It was pretty satisfying to see the numbers go up and down as people walked by.
The End Result (For Now)
After a lot of fiddling, I got something that worked… okay. It’s definitely not something you could sell, but it’s good enough for a little experiment. It’s pretty cool to see it actually tracking people, even if it’s not 100% accurate.
It’s a start, though! I’m thinking about maybe trying to improve it later. Maybe use a better camera, or try some different detection methods. But for now, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got.