Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea of counting people in really packed places, you know, like stadiums or big event halls. The whole point is to help manage crowds and make sure things don’t get too crazy, safety-wise.
Getting Started
First, I grabbed a bunch of videos of crowds. I needed something to test my setup on, right? I found some decent footage online, just general stuff of people moving around in busy areas.
The Techy Stuff
I’m using this thing called OpenCV, which is like a toolbox for computer vision. And I paired it up with a pre-trained model, MobileNet SSD, It’s good at spotting people in images and videos.
Coding It Up
The code itself isn’t too wild. I did these below:
- Loaded the video: Pretty basic, just telling the program where to find the video file.
- Set up the model: This was a bit more involved, getting the MobileNet SSD ready to go.
- Looped through the frames: The main part! For each frame of the video, I did the following:
- Used that thing to find people in this part of the video.
Drew some boxes that show where it thinks the people are.
Counted up all those boxes.
- Showed the result: I made it display the video with the boxes and the count, so I could see what was happening.
Tweaks and Turns
It wasn’t perfect at first. Sometimes it would miss people, or count things that weren’t people. So, I spent some time playing with the settings, like the “confidence threshold” (basically, how sure the model is that it’s actually seeing a person). I did some adjust to make it more accurate.
Making it Useful
Just counting people is okay, but I wanted something more practical. So, I added a little feature where it checks if the count goes over a certain number (the “capacity” I set). If it does, it throws up a warning, this place is getting too full!
The End Result
I ended up with a pretty neat little program. It can watch a video of a crowded place and tell you, in real-time, how many people are there. And it’ll even flag up if things are getting too packed. It’s not perfect, but it’s a solid start. I can see this being really helpful for event organizers or anyone who needs to keep an eye on crowd sizes.