Counting and Tracking People to Avoid from Crowded in a Restaurant Using mmWave Radar

One key to implementing the smart city is letting the smart space know where and how many people are. The visual method is a scheme to recognize people with high accuracy, but concerns arise regard-ing potential privacy leakage and user nonacceptance. Besides, being func-tional in a limited environment in an emergency should also be considered. We propose a real-time people counting and tracking system based on a millimeter wave radar (mmWave) as an alternative to the optical solutions in a restaurant. The proposed method consists of four main procedures. First, capture the point cloud of obstacles and generate them using a low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mmWave radar. Next, cluster the individual point with similar properties. Then the same people in sequen-tial frames would be associated with the tracking algorithm. Finally, the estimated people would be counted, tracked, and shown in the next frame. The experiment results show that our proposed system provided a median position error of 0.17 m and counting accuracy of 83.5% for ten insiders in various scenarios in an actual restaurant environment. In addition, the real-time estimation and visualization of people's numbers and positions show a potential capability to help prevent crowds during the pandemic of Covid-19 and analyze customer visitation patterns for efficient management and target marketing.