People counting using image processing has been carried out for years. Conventional methods can count people accurately when only a few isolated people pass through a counting region in a non-crowded situation. In this paper, the emphasis is on people counting in a crowded environment and a method using head search and model matching is described. A camera is mounted vertically downwards viewing the people heads from the top. People head search can be used to locate some passengers. In addition, templates obtained from the perspective projection of the human model are used to locate and isolate individual person. Our approach cams at dealing with a congested situation where occlusion is a major problem. This paper describes a real-time, high-accuracy, automated people counting system that has been developed. Experimental results are illustrated and the effectiveness of the developed method for real-time application is verified.published_or_final_versio
