Pedestrian monitoring system for indoor billboard evaluation

Recent event monitoring, safety planning and location evaluation applications require models of pedestrian movements as well as monitoring of their presence. These indispensible insights have to be integrated in larger software systems seamlessly. In this work we propose a pedestrian monitoring system which supports these applications by a novel, robust analysis method based only on few empirical measurements. The gathering of empirical data on pedestrian movement and its analysis are combined via Open Geographic Consortium (OGC) compliant protocols. This utilizes usage of heterogeneous movement sensors, as well as fast integration of the analysis results in other applications. We demonstrate our novel method in an industrial billboard performance evaluation use case. Whereas for billboard evaluation a handful of pioneer countries trace personal mobility now via GPS devices, GPS technology has the drawback that it cannot be applied indoors due to signal loss. In Switzerland and Germany many valuable posters are situated in public buildings such as train stations or shopping malls and their evaluation is of high interest. In this paper we therefore present a new approach for the evaluation of mixed indoor-outdoor campaigns. Our pedestrian monitoring system is applied to denote at once quantities and trajectories of the people in restricted spaces based on empirical movement observations. Our approach has been implemented for 27 major train stations in Switzerland and was integrated in a system which evaluates performance of billboard mixed indoor/outdoor advertisement campaigns.