Crowd-Centric Counting via Unsupervised Learning

Counting targets (people or things) within a monitored area is an important task in emerging wireless applications, including those for smart environments, safety, and security. Conventional device-free radio-based systems for counting targets rely on localization and data association (i.e., individ...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Morselli, Flavio, Bartoletti, Stefania, Mazuelas, Santiago, Win, Moe Z., Conti, Andrea
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2020
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123538
Description
Summary:Counting targets (people or things) within a monitored area is an important task in emerging wireless applications, including those for smart environments, safety, and security. Conventional device-free radio-based systems for counting targets rely on localization and data association (i.e., individual-centric information) to infer the number of targets present in an area (i.e., crowd-centric information). However, many applications (e.g., affluence analytics) require only crowd-centric rather than individual-centric information. Moreover, individual-centric approaches may be inadequate due to the complexity of data association. This paper proposes a new technique for crowd-centric counting of device-free targets based on unsupervised learning, where the number of targets is inferred directly from a low-dimensional representation of the received waveforms. The proposed technique is validated via experimentation using an ultra-wideband sensor radar in an indoor environment.