Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE

International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics

December 5-10, 2014, Bali, Indonesia

Development of a Person Counting System Using a 3D Laser Scanner

Shun-ichi Akamatsu1 , Naohiro Shimaji2 and Tetsuo Tomizawa1

Abstract— The purpose of the present study is to develop

a person counting system using a 3D laser scanner. The
system consists of a person-detection component, a tracking
component, and a counting component. The person-detection
component detects human bodies as a point cloud, even if a
number of people are close to each other. To achieve this,
we use a method of grouping the point cloud towards the
bottom from the top. The tracking component tracks the
detected person using a Kalman filter. The counting component
counts the number of people who enter and exit a structure.
Experimental results obtained in the present study reveal that
the proposed system can recognize individual pedestrians and
count the number of people passing through crowded outdoor
environments.

I. INTRODUCTION
It is very important for administrators of public facilities
or shops to know the number of visitors using their facilities.
In order to determine the exact number of people that visit
a particular establishment, the number of people passing
through the doorways of the building must be counted.
Doorways located in semi-outdoor environments are affected
by rain and sunlight. In addition, occlusions often occur
in crowded passages. Therefore, existing systems have poor
accuracy.
There are conventional methods by which to detect a
person in such an environment. One typical method for hu-
man detection involves the use of ceiling cameras [1][2][3].
K. Terada et al. and D. Beymer used a stereo camera attached
to the ceiling [1][2]. S. Velipasalar et al. used a single
camera attached to the ceiling [3] for human detection. These
systems often fail to detect a person when changes in the
lighting conditions occur. Methods using 2D laser scanners
have also been proposed [4][5]. K. Nakamura et al. used
multiple single-row laser scanners installed on a pole inside a
passageway [4]. K. Katabira et al. are also using a single-row
laser scanner attached to the ceiling [5]. A 2D laser scanner
can be used to measure distance. However, blind areas often
occur in crowded environments. In addition, sensors must be
installed at the same height as the flow line of the people,
which may not be acceptable for building owners because of
potential problems associated with landscaping.
Recently, we have been developing an intelligent au-
tomatic door system using a 3D laser scanner [6]. The
system measures the velocity, the position, and the width
of a pedestrian and judges whether the person intends to
1 S. Akamatsu and T. Tomizawa are with the Department of Human
Media Systems at Graduate School of Information Systems, The Univer-
sity of Electro-Communications, Choufu, Tokyo, Japan, {akamatsu,
tomys}@taka.is.uec.ac.jp
2 N. Shimaji is with the Department of Engineering Hokuyo Automatic
Co., Ltd., Osaka, Japan shimaji@hokuyo-aut.jp
Fig. 1. Target environment
pass through a doorway, so that the door-opening timing
is appropriate. The 3D laser scanner used in the system is
robust to illumination changes. In addition, it is not necessary
to install a pole or a sensor on the floor or wall because
the sensor is attached to the top of the door. Moreover, this
system has no dead space and does not adversely affect the
landscape.
In the present paper, we propose a method by which to
count the number of people entering and exiting a structure
using a 3D laser scanner that was developed for use as an
automatic door sensor.
II. S ENSOR
In the present study, we used the 3D laser scanner de-
veloped by Hokuyo Automatic Co., Ltd. as a door sensor.
The measurement is based on a time-of-flight (TOF) method,
in which the distance is calculated from the time difference
between emitting a laser beam and receiving the reflected
beam. The specifications of the sensor are shown in Table I.
The detection area on the ground is 5.0 m in width and 2.8
m in depth when the sensor is attached at a height of 3.1 m.
The scanning area is shown in Fig. 2. The data sent from the
sensor includes the distance to the object and the projection
angle of the laser beam, and it is possible to obtain data
(5,440 points/frame) at 10 Hz.
III. A LGORITHM
In this section, we describe the algorithm for counting the
number of people passing through a doorway. The algorithm
can be roughly divided into person-detection, tracking, and
counting components. First, the sensor data is separated into
individual objects by grouping. Next, the individual objects

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Fig. 2. Overview of the sensor and scanning area

TABLE I
S PECIFICATIONS OF THE SENSOR (a) Photograph of the experiment
Specification
Optical source laser diode
Type of Measurement TOF (pulse-modulated signals)
Scanning Device Resonant mirror
Horizontal Range 72 deg
Vertical Range 42 deg
Frame Rate 10 Hz
Number of Observation Points 5,440 points/frame
Temperature Resistance -20 to 50◦ C
Size 127 (H)× 230 (L)× 83 (W) mm

are identified as being/not being people, and the objects

identified as people are tracked. Finally, the system counts
the number of people who enter and exit a structure based
on the movement trajectory of the tracked individuals.

A. Person detection
The person-detection component extracts human figures
from point clouds observed by the 3D sensor.
1) Grouping: The point clouds consists of more than one
person and other moving objects.
(b) Raw point cloud
If these objects are sufficiently separated, it is possible
to identify each person using a simple grouping method
Fig. 3. Raw point cloud data
based only on the point-to-point distance. However, if the
distance between individuals is very short, persons are cannot
be separated by the simple grouping method. On the other
hand, since the head of a walking person is generally not in a horizontal distance of less than 0.2 m (x and y axes)
contact with another object, we adopt a method that groups between a point and a previously labeled point and a
the point cloud from top to bottom based on the heads vertical distance of less than 0.5 m (z-axis distance). If
of individual people, which makes it possible to separate there is no labeled point, then the second highest point
the point cloud associated with each person. This grouping is assigned a new label, i.e., group B.
method is described below. 4) This procedure is repeated until all points in the cloud
are labeled.
1) The point cloud is sorted in ascending order according
to the heights of the points (on the z-axis). The raw point cloud data is shown in Fig. 3. The results
2) The highest point is labeled group A. of the grouping are shown in Fig. 4. Points of the same color
3) Next, focus on the second highest point. If the distance are assigned to a single object.
between the point and a point of a previously defined 2) Determination of whether a detected object is a person:
group is short, the same label is assigned to the point of We next consider whether or not a detected object is a person.
focus. The thresholds for determining the closeness are The determination is based on the whole-body size of each

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 TABLE II
PARAMETERS AND CONDITIONS FOR PERSON DETERMINATION
Parameter Parameter name Condition
Range of the height of the object objectheight > 0.2 m
Area of the object objectarea > 0.05 m2
Width of the object objectwidth > 0.2 m
Depth of the object objectdepth > 0.2 m
Range of the height of the head headheight > 0.1 m
Area of the head headarea > 0.02 m2
Width of the head headwidth > 0.1 m
Depth of the head headdepth > 0.1 m
Ground height of the head headz > 0.5 m

Fig. 4. Result of grouping

Fig. 6. Result of person detection (red rectangle)

• objectarea
1) Project the point cloud of the object onto the x-y
plane.
2) Calculate the smallest convex polygon that con-
tains all point clouds projected onto the x-y plane.
3) Calculate the area of the convex polygon. Here,
Fig. 5. Extracted head points the area is defined as objectarea .
• objectwidth , objectdepth

1) Calculate the smallest rectangle that contains

group and the shapes of the upper 10-cm part of each group,
which are considered to belong to the heads of individuals.
The body parameters consist of range of height, area, width,
and depth. The head parameters consist of range of height,
area, width, depth, and ground height. The results of head
detection for each object are shown in Fig. 5. The object is
determined to be a person if all of the parameters satisfy the
conditions shown in Table II. The parameters are set to be
low so that the system does not generate false negatives. The
method used to calculate the parameters is shown below, and
the results of determination are shown in Fig. 6.
• objectheight
Calculate the minimum and maximum heights of
the point cloud of an object ( zmin , zmax ). Here,
objectheight is defined as (zmax − zmin ).
the convex polygon, which is calculated when
objectarea is calculated.
2) The long side of the rectangle is defined as
objectwidth , and the short side of the rectangle
is defined as objectdepth .
The parameters for head of the object are calculated using
the same method.
B. Tracking
In the present paper, we assume people undertake uniform,
linear motion. Therefore, the system tracks people using
a Kalman filter. If the center of the person is defined as
the center of the detected object described in Section III-A,
the center of the person may vary significantly because the
size of the detected object varies according to whether arms

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 Fig. 7. Result of person tracking (blue lines)
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Fig. 8. Count line
or baggage are also detected in the same group. However,
the center of the head of a person is not affected by such
variations. Therefore, in the present paper, the center of a
person tracked using a Kalman filter is defined as the center
of the person’s head. The tracking condition ends when a
person who is being tracked exits the effective sensor area or
cannot be detected for more than half a second. The tracking
results are shown in Fig. 7.
C. Counting
The count line shown in Fig. 8 defines the effective area
of the sensor used to count the number of people entering
and exiting a structure. The person tracked in Section III-
B is determined that the person exists in front of the count
line or behind it. The system determines that the person is
entering the structure if the person moves from the front of
the count line to behind it. Moreover, the system determines
that the person is exiting the structure if the person moves
from behind the count line to in front of it.
IV. E XPERIMENT
We attached the 3D laser senor at a height of 3.1 m at the
top of the entrance of a store, as shown in Fig. 9. The count
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(a) Overview of the sensor and doorway
(b) Photograph of the experimental setup
Fig. 9. Experimental environment
line was defined as 0.9 m from the door. We then counted
the number of persons who enter or exit the structure.
The experiment was run for approximately 90 minutes.
The total number of persons entering and exiting during the
experiment was 361 and 388, respectively. Scenes (a), (b),
and (c), taken during the experiment, are shown in Figs. 10,
11, and 12. Figure 10 shows the point cloud and counting
results and a photograph for a situation in which people are
simultaneously entering and exiting the structure. Figure 11
shows the point cloud and counting results and a photograph
for a situation in which people are close to each other. Figure
12 the point cloud and counting results and a photograph for
a situation in which four people are simultaneously entering
and exiting the structure. It was possible to detect persons
using the proposed algorithm in Scenes (a), (b), and (c).
 (a) Point cloud and results of counting
(a) Point cloud and results of counting

(b) Photograph captured from the view-

point of the sensor (b) Photograph captured from the view-
point of the sensor

Fig. 10. Experimental scene (a)

Fig. 11. Experimental scene (b)

The total number of people entering and exiting the structure

as determined by the proposed system was 365 and 389,
respectively. Therefore, the error in the proposed system was
less than 2%.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In the present paper, we proposed a method by which to
count the number of persons entering or exiting a structure
using a 3D laser scanner. We focus attention on a person’s
head, the grouping method was based on the height of
the point cloud, so that the system was able to detect
multiple individuals in close proximity to one another. A
demonstration experiment was conducted in order to confirm
the possibility of counting people in various situations,
such as two people in close proximity entering a structure (a) Point cloud and results of counting
and multiple people simultaneously entering or exiting the
structure. The proposed system can recognize individual
pedestrians and can count the number of people passing
through crowded outdoor environments.
Further experiments are necessary in order to confirm
the detection accuracy, for example, for differences in body
height, as in the case of children and adults, or for people
carrying baggage or wearing hats.

(b) Photograph captured from the view-

point of the sensor

Fig. 12. Experimental scene (c)

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