Low cost crowd counting using audio tones

Pravein Govindan Kannan, Seshadri Padmanabha Venkatagiri, Mun Choon Chan, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Li-Shiuan Peh
2012 Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems - SenSys '12  
With mobile devices becoming ubiquitous, collaborative applications have become increasingly pervasive. In these applications, there is a strong need to obtain a count of the number of mobile devices present in an area, as it closely approximates the size of the crowd. Ideally, a crowd counting solution should be easy to deploy, scalable, energy efficient, be minimally intrusive to the user and reasonably accurate. Existing solutions using data communication or RFID do not meet these criteria.
more » ... n this paper, we propose a crowd counting solution based on audio tones, leveraging the microphones and speaker phones that are commonly available on most phones, tackling all the above criteria. We have implemented our solution on 25 Android phones and run several experiments at a bus stop, aboard a bus, within a cafeteria and a classroom. Experimental evaluations show that we are able to achieve up to 90% accuracy and consume 81% less energy than the WiFi interface in idle mode.
doi:10.1145/2426656.2426673 dblp:conf/sensys/KannanSCAP12 fatcat:xtcjjsajejfobio5azdeyzk6cy