Research Article
Analyzing Pedestrian Flows Based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Captures
@ARTICLE{10.4108/ue.1.4.e4, author={Lorenz Schauer and Martin Werner}, title={Analyzing Pedestrian Flows Based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Captures}, journal={EAI Endorsed Transactions on Ubiquitous Environments}, volume={1}, number={4}, publisher={ICST}, journal_a={UE}, year={2015}, month={5}, keywords={crowd density, pedestrian flow, tracking, Wi-Fi probes, Bluetooth}, doi={10.4108/ue.1.4.e4} }
- Lorenz Schauer
Martin Werner
Year: 2015
Analyzing Pedestrian Flows Based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Captures
UE
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/ue.1.4.e4
Abstract
The rapid deployment of smartphones has led to a wide adoption of wireless communication systems such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Both techniques leak information to the surroundings during operation. This information has been used in literature for estimating pedestrian flows, b ut t he c orrelation t o g round truth has not yet been evaluated. Thus, a reliable deployment in real world scenarios is rather difficult. To fill in this gap, we use ground truth provided by the security check process at a major airport and evaluate the quality of crowd information gathered from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth captures. We analyze estimated pedestrian flows and present three approaches improving the accuracy compared to a naive count of captured MAC addresses. Such counts only showed an impractical Pearson correlation of 0.53 for Bluetooth and 0.61 for Wi-Fi. The presented approaches yield a better correlation and allow for a practical estimation of pedestrian flows.
Copyright © 2015 L. Schauer and M. Werner, licensed to ICST. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited.