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xibosignage / xibo

Xibo Digital Signage
https://xibosignage.com
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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People Counter #50

Open laercionit opened 9 years ago

laercionit commented 9 years ago

People Counter

I believe this is a trend in the market, integrate the system to a counter of people who went and looked at the display.

We could have a WebCam, connected to android. The software android would have the option to enable Track People. If enabled, select the webcam.

This information is valuable, could be presented in Statistics, part of the Layout or Display.

Not complex but has a potential for the market.

I hope you like the idea DAN.

dasgarner commented 9 years ago

Applies to all players I think.

knitehawk commented 9 years ago

you could also just connect it to a motion sensor that would then activate the camera, or send a signal (Serial, or other) to counter

laercionit commented 9 years ago

Ideally recognize the USB camera compatible with the player (Android, WIndows, Linux). Then apply a face recognizer. There bilbiotecas ready for it. Thus not only accounts for the people who have to screen, keep a record of all who were looking at the screen.

This information would be sent to the CMS usually presenting in statistics and content

dasgarner commented 9 years ago

My feeling is that this involves some fairly complicated face recognition technology (gender detection, eye tracking, etc) and that an interface to a 3rd party solution would be the most likely route (or indeed a library project - if there is such a thing).

laercionit commented 9 years ago

Dan, There are libraries for Java and AspNet ready to smile and face detect

dasgarner commented 9 years ago

OK great - it would be good to have the links in here for reference. Depending on how the integration was managed they may/may not need to be open source.

laercionit commented 9 years ago

Java OpenCV Bindings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bpwJtQ65oY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcONLfkFSNM http://answers.opencv.org/question/12978/face-detection-through-a-webcam-in-java/

nagyrobi commented 9 years ago

Uh Oh just a chime in here, in many places around the world placement of webcams like this rises privacy issues. Displays in public areas (public means really public: open streets, parks owned by state or local administration etc) may have such cameras, but displays in private areas (like shops, malls, gas stations, cinemas) can only have cameras if there's an autorization for that. Thus in places like this people counter could be fesable only with motion detectors, which would just simply count the motion occurences.

dasgarner commented 9 years ago

I think that only counting motion defeats the object slightly as the data is not that useful. If there are privacy concerns then I think that is up to the signage operator to manage and enable/disable any people counting functionality. In much the same way as it is their responsibility to ensure people are not putting copyright video on their signs.

I did find this (http://opencv.org/) which might provide an open source solution that can be used cross platform. There are also a bunch of commercial ones we could integrate with.

nagyrobi commented 9 years ago

Agree, my chime was in order to keep in mind that this could conflict with legislation in some countries, so software should be developed in a manner that this feature should be possible to be completely uninstalled, or maybe installed optionally as a plugin or a package or something similar. Legislation specifies that in certain areas "the installation of equipment able to do this is prohibited", so that means, the deployer of the signage has to be able to prove that the screen hardware under no circumstances offers any possibility to do that. Having just a tickbox to enable/disable is not enough. Otherwise Xibo can be de-installed from these locations and something else must be put instead... which is not desirable for the project, I guess...

dasgarner commented 9 years ago

Interesting point, so this legislation would force an entirely separate piece of software that can be completely removed (i.e. not installed). Which countries are we talking about here?

Most of the "people counter" software I have seen acts as a integral part of the host application (integrated with SDK) - the thought of maintaining two version of the player doesn't appeal to me that much :smile:

nagyrobi commented 9 years ago

Mainly Easten Europe.

laercionit commented 9 years ago

Dan We're talking about allowing the APP recognize a webcam, select the device and collect data.

For countries where this feature is not allowed is not the responsibility system, but the user does not use. The system is global, each location if you need to be aware that restricting the use or not of the resource.

dasgarner commented 9 years ago

We aren't lawyers so we don't really know - it seems to me that installing a device without a webcam would solve the issue completely (even if the software provides the functionality, if the hardware isn't there - it cannot be used).

Happy with that @nagyrobi ?

nagyrobi commented 9 years ago

Happy as long as it's possible to completely disable the functionality in the software too. Things like

Could be enabled by defauld for the entire world, and have this hidden config setting in the file on the CMS which when set to 1, would completely disable and hide all this stuff.

supportreq commented 9 years ago

Really important are we implementing this??

dasgarner commented 9 years ago

You can see further discussion on this here: https://community.xibo.org.uk/t/number-of-people-who-viewed-a-specific-screen/721