In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the number of pedestrians walking in opposite directions, as in cases of a shopping street or a sidewalk in a downtown area. The proposed method utilizes a compound-eye sensor that is constructed by placing two binary sensors for the pedestrians' movement direction and multiple binary sensors for the vertical direction of the pedestrians' movement direction. A number of Monte Carlo simulations about the movement of pedestrians are conducted, and the output history of the compound-eye sensor is obtained in each simulation. The simulation scenario with a small difference of the output history of the compound-eye sensor is selected to estimate the number of pedestrians. Evaluation results show that in the field whose width is 8 [m] the relative error in the proposed method is the smallest by using 2×8 binary sensors.
Keywords: Binary sensor; Monte Carlo method; Pedestrian counting; Sensor network.