Edinburgh Napier University

  The ability to collect pedestrian flow data, without the need for subsequent post-processing and analysis to extract measurements such as density and flow rate is a goal, which up to now, has proved infeasible on a large scale for a number of reasons, such as the cost of processing the data, the ability of the people observing the scene or subsequent video tapes and the effects of variation in the lighting conditions of the area being observed. A system using low cost infrared sensors is described that can be used to track the movement of pedestrians within their field of view and the resulting data stream is then used to generate density, flow-rate and speed data and instantaneous counts every two seconds. This data is displayed and also saved in a file. In addition, the path taken by each pedestrian can also be written to file for post-processing. The processing system associated with the sensors has been designed to be scalable from the outset and we describe how this has been achieved to ensure that it can be used in a variety of application environments.