Tracking System to Automate Data Collection of Microscopic Pedestrian Traffic Flow

Abstract: To deal with many pedestrian data, automatic data collection is needed. This paper describes how to automate the microscopic pedestrian flow data collection from video files. The study is restricted only to pedestrians without considering vehicular - pedestrian interaction. Pedestrian tracking system consists of three sub-systems, which calculates the image processing, object tracking and traffic flow variables. The system receives input of stacks of images and parameters. The first sub-system performs Image Processing analysis while the second sub-system carries out the tracking of pedestrians by matching the features and tracing the pedestrian numbers frame by frame. The last sub-system deals with a NTXY database to calculate the pedestrian traffic-flow characteristic such as flow rate, speed and area module. Comparison with manual data collection method confirmed that the procedures described have significant potential to automate the data collection of both microscopic and macroscopic pedestrian flow variables.