United States Department of Transportation
i
Automated pedestrian counter : final report, February 2010.
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2010-02-01
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[PDF-6.14 MB]
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Abstract:Emerging sensor technologies accelerated the shift toward automatic pedestrian counting methods to
acquire reliable long-term data for transportation design, planning, and safety studies. Although a
number of commercial pedestrian sensors are available, their accuracy under different pedestrian
traffic flow conditions is still questionable. Moreover, it is difficult to assess the suitability of different
sensors for different locations. Some sensors claimed to be more accurate are substantially more
expensive. Ease of deployment, power requirements, and long-term deployment issues all play an
important role in the selection of sensors. This study attempts to shed light on the understanding of
field performance of two commercially available automatic pedestrian sensors by performing rigorous
comparisons—namely, a passive infrared counter by EcoCounter and a thermal sensor by TrafSys. A
major innovation of this study was to simultaneously deploy the two relatively different sensor
technologies—thermal and infrared sensors—under the same experimental conditions to compare
their performances. To achieve this in a statistically robust manner, pairwise tests were conducted at
trails and intersections with different pedestrian flow levels and characteristics. Statistically significant
differences in terms of accuracy were found. The thermal sensor was found to produce less error
than EcoCounter, which significantly undercounted pedestrians at intersections. This result was
expected since EcoCounter is recommended for trail settings. The results also demonstrated the
variability of both sensors given different deployment conditions. A calibration procedure for the
EcoCounter data was also presented.
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