Studies and systems that are aimed at the identification of the presence of people within an indoor environment and the monitoring of their activities and flows have been receiving more attention in recent years, specifically since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper proposes an approach for people counting that is based on the use of cameras and Raspberry Pi platforms, together with an edge-based transfer learning framework that is enriched with specific image processing strategies, with the aim of this approach being adopted in different indoor environments without the need for tailored training phases. The system was deployed on a university campus, which was chosen as the case study. The proposed system was able to work in classrooms with different characteristics. This paper reports a proposed architecture that could make the system scalable and privacy compliant and the evaluation tests that were conducted in different types of classrooms, which demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. Overall, the system was able to count the number of people in classrooms with a maximum mean absolute error of 1.23.
Keywords: Internet of Things; ambient intelligence; deep learning; occupancy detection; smart buildings; smart environments; smart sensing; transfer learning.