Evaluation of an Arduino-based IoT Person Counter

Bruno F. Carvalho, Caio C. M. Silva, Alessandra M. Silva, Fábio Buiati and Rafael Timóteo
Laboratório LATITUDE – Faculdade de Tecnologia, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Darcy Ribeiro, Brasília, Brazil

Keywords: IoT Devices, Arduino, Motion Sensor, Ultrasonic Sensor.

Abstract: The IoT devices can provide a wide range of information, which can be used to infer the behavior patterns
with a large semantic bias. In this sense, an IoT network has the ability to use trafficked information to perform
its own management. One type of information that can be used by an IoT network is the amount of people in
a certain place. This information, combined with others, can help IoT-based systems discover characteristics
about the environment in which it is deployed. Thus, the integration of the data captured provides the
achievement of manifold applications, such as air conditioning regulation, security access and people
management in a working environment. In this research, it is proposed the implementation of an IoT person
counter. Two different technologies were used, aiming to verify the best option to design a counter device
with low-cost microcontrollers and sensors. Experimental results shows that in controlled environments the
IoT person counter has a satisfactory accuracy. Some limitations were also identified in order to clarify the
scenarios where those devices can be used.

1 INTRODUCTION (e.g., a few meters for GPS positions). Furthermore,

each technology has its own specifications and
The Internet of Things enables opportunities for more limitations, creating some technical restrictions
direct integration between the physical world and during the construction of an IoT device (Henricksen,
computer-based systems. Devices inserted in an IoT 2004).
environment must be able to communicate and In this way, this paper presents the
propagate information about the digital and physical implementation of an IoT device that has the ability
environment, in which they are present. The to inform how many persons there are in a room. This
information gathered by those devices can be used to information can be useful in a variety of scenarios: to
provide services with fully awareness of current control the room temperature; to alert if the number
execution environment, and also, can be used to of persons exceeds the supported by the site; to send
minimize the power consumption, processing time information about trespassing; to count how many
and the amount of packages trafficked on the persons are using public places, in addition to several
network. others.
Information of several natures can be propagated Since imperfect or incomplete data may hinder the
in an IoT network, from the device hardware proper functioning of an IoT-based system, the
specification to the data inferred based on the proposal was implemented using two different
information captured from the physical environment. approaches: motion and ultrasonic technology. Those
For example, an IoT device can send a message with technologies have been combined with
a given information about the temperature, humidity, microcontrollers to create a device capable of
luminosity, or motion detection, among others. Such informing, with accuracy, the difference of
information can be used to characterize the execution individuals entering and exiting a particular room. In
environment. order to find the best alternative for this purpose, all
However, the information provided by IoT implementations were evaluated in the aspect of
devices have an innate characteristic of imperfection validity of the information provided.
and its quality is highly influenced by the way it is The remainder of this paper is organized as
gathered. In fact, this information may even be follows. Section II presents a brief discussion about
incorrect. Most sensors feature an inherent inaccuracy IoT devices and used technologies. The IoT person

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Carvalho, B., Silva, C., Silva, A., Buiati, F. and Timóteo, R.
Evaluation of an Arduino-based IoT Person Counter.
DOI: 10.5220/0005954601290136
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of Things and Big Data (IoTBD 2016), pages 129-136
ISBN: 978-989-758-183-0
Copyright c 2016 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
IoTBD 2016 - International Conference on Internet of Things and Big Data

counter implementations are described in section III. 2.2.1 Arduino

In section IV it is presented a set of experimental
results. Finally, conclusions and discussions of future Arduino is an open-source prototyping platform
work are shown in section V. composed by a microcontroller or physical
programmable circuit board and a software or IDE
that runs in a computer. The Arduino boards interacts
2 RELATED CONCEPTS with the environment through peripheral components,
like electronic sensors, lights, and motors. Then,
using the Arduino programming language and the
In this section, we raise some concepts related to IoT
Arduino Software (IDE), it is possible to manipulate
objects, in order to characterize the scenario, which
data captured (W. Arduino, 2016).
fits our proposal. First, on section 2.1 is presented
Nowadays, there are several different types of
some concepts related to IoT devices. Next section,
controllers on Arduino platform, which differ mostly
describes concepts on microcontrollers and Arduinos.
on IO pins and version of flash memory (Raspaile,
Sections 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5 clarify the concepts related
2013). The most important ones are Arduino Uno,
to motion and ultrasonic technologies, respectively.
Arduino Mega2560, Arduino Nano, Arduino Mini,
Arduino Due, Arduino Leonardo and Arduino ADK.
2.1 IoT Devices
The increasing number of smart devices, ranging
2.3 Motion Sensor
from computers to simple domestic appliances,
A motion sensor is a device used to detect movements
together with the ease of access to the internet,
in a certain area and it can use multiple types of
brought up the notion of Internet of Things
technologies to perform this task, which defines
(IoT). There are several ways to define IoT, but the
aspects such as range, precision and sensitivity
essence of the concept is the device interconnection.
(M.Sensor, 2016). There are two main types of
IoT can be defined as a global network infrastructure
motion sensors:
where physical devices, with a unique identity and a
virtual representation, have the ability to • Passive sensor: it detects variations in energy in
communicate with other devices and distributed the surrounding area, but it does not emity
architectures, like clusters, grids and clouds (Manna, energy.
2014). Besides the communication with each other, • Active sensor: it transmits infrared light,
IoT devices are able to access information on the microwave radiation, or sound waves and waits
internet, to retrieve and manipulate data and to for its response. Due to continuous activity, this
interact with users. Thus, it is possible to increasingly type of sensor consumes a significantly larger
observe the fusion of the physical and digital world. amount of energy.
In a typical IoT structure there are different types There are several applications for motion sensors.
of sensors, such as temperature, motion, humidity, The most common are: security systems, to open and
RFID, used to obtain specific data about the close automatic doors and to turn on lights when a
environment. These sensors are connected with person enters a room.
embedded devices that collect and process the data
provided by the sensors (Toma, 2014). 2.4 Ultrasonic Sensor
2.2 Microcontroller The operation of an ultrasonic sensor is based on the
transmission of ultrasonic pulses and the time
Primarily, it was called a microcomputer due to the response of the pulses. In this way, the principle
fact that includes built-in RAM, ROM, and I/O underlying this technology is that speed of sound in
(Gridling, 2006). air is approximately constant (Wijk, 1998). Thus,
Differently from microprocessors, the objective in estimating the time for pulse reflection allows
developing microcontrollers was to create a complete knowing the distance to the object due to the
computer in a single chip with memory, peripherals proportionality relation. Therefore, ultrasonic sensors
components and a processor that can be used as an are used frequently to detect objects and for distance
embedded system (Sickle, 2001). Nowadays, there measurement applications.
are embedded systems that require a minimal of These sensors are capable of detecting any type of
memory and processing, while others are extremely object that have sufficient acoustic reflectivity. On
sophisticated.

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Table 1: Person counter REST request.

Method Request Description

PUT http://server-ip/service?serv_name=A&dev_id=B&info=C Generic request

Example of a request where the device id

PUT http://172.2.2.10/service?serv_name=count&dev_id=5&pc=5 is 5, the number of people in the room is 5,
and service name is count

Example of a request where the device id

PUT http://172.2.2.10/service?serv_name=count&dev_id=1&pc=9 is 1, the number of people in the room is 9,
and service name is count

the other hand, sound absorbing material, such as device. The prototype of this device was built with an
cloth and foam, are not easily identified. Arduino Uno (A.Uno, 2016) and two motion sensors
model DYP-ME003 (Motion, 2011).

3 IoT PERSON COUNTER 3.1.1 Circuit Schema

The circuit schema of the motion person counter is
In this section are presented the proposed IoT person
presented on Figure 1. This circuit is composed by
counters. Such devices have the ability to inform how two PIR sensors (motion sensor) connected with one
many people are present in the environment in which Arduino Uno. The power of these sensors (VCC) is
they are installed. The IoT person counter takes
supplied by the 5V Arduino pin. The ground (GND)
advantage of well-established technologies, for of each sensor is attached in the GND Arduino pin,
example ultrasonic, to perform the counting of the signal output of the first sensor is connected at the
individuals transiting in a certain place.
digital pin 7 and the signal of the second one at digital
It is noteworthy that all these devices communicate pin 8.
with a central server through a REST interface (Silva,
2016), informing their unique identification (dev_id),
the service name (serv_name) and the people count
information (pc). The data is sent via Wi-Fi technology
using an Arduino Wi-Fi shield (A.WiFi, 2016). Table
1 presents the generic structure for REST, as well,
examples of the requests performed by the IoT devices.
The proposal presentation is divided into two
subsections. First, it is presented the IoT person
counter based on motion sensor technology. Next
subsection, presents an implementation using
ultrasonic sensors. All subsections presents a circuit
schematic, an algorithm that performs the counting
process and the specification of technologies used to
build the devices. It also elucidates the limitations of
each technology and their impact on the capture of
environmental data.

3.1 Motion Approach

Figure 1: Motion person counter circuit schema.
The motion approach for an IoT person counter was
designed with a microcontroller and two motion In its default state, the motion sensor sends
sensors. The microcontroller verifies which sensor through the signal pin a LOW (0) output, meaning
was activated and waits for the activation of the other that there is no movement. When the PIR sensor
sensor. If both were activated in a given time interval, detects motion, the signal output is HIGH (1) on the
it is identified that a person has passed in front of the correspondent Arduino digital pin. The combine of

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two of these sensors allows four different states: two end while
sensors on 0, one sensor on 1 and another on 0 or two end procedure
sensors on 1. When the two sensors are HIGH, can be
detected that a person passed in front of the sensors. The motion sensors used on this implementation have
some technical restrictions that should be taken into
3.1.2 Algorithm account as they directly impact in the device
implementation: The sensor stands in HIGH for 2.5
The motion approach algorithm is presented in seconds: When the DYP-ME003 sensor detects
Algorithm 1. The implementation defines a procedure motion, it stands in high for approximately 2.5
named read_opposite_sensor(byte, bool, int), and seconds. In this time interval, the sensor is
other named main. The read_apposite_sensor incapacitated to perform data capture. This limitation
receives as parameter: a byte, which indicates the undermines the counting process, if people pass in a
sensor_id, a boolean value that gives the direction in time interval shorter than 2.5 seconds. Besides that,
which the person is passing and an int value that only one person can pass in front of the device, if a
represents the time interval when the sensor has to be group of people pass, the device will recognize as just
read. one person.
This procedure performs the reading of the
opposite sensor during the time interval max_time, if
it recognizes any motion, then it detected passage of
3.2 Ultrasonic Approach
an individual. Depending on the direction, the
The ultrasonic IoT person counter was built with one
procedure can add or subtract the value in the persons
microcontroller and two ultrasonic sensors. This
counter.
device performs its functionality similarly to the
The main procedure is executed while the device
motion device. The difference consists on the
is on and checks if any motion was detected in any of
information provided by the sensor. The ultrasonic
the sensors. In the case of motion detection,
device informs the distance of an object that is ahead
read_opposite_sensor function is called to see if
of it.
anyone passed in front of the other sensor. It is
Therefore, the device checks at what distance an
important to notice that this implementation does not
object is from the sensor and waits until the other
use external libraries, just Arduino pre-defined
sensor recognizes the object in the same distance
functions.
interval. In this case, it is recognized that someone has
Algorithm 1: Motion person counter passed in front of the device. The prototype of this
procedure read_opposite_sensor(byte device was built with an Arduino Uno (A.Uno, 2016)
sensor, bool direction, int max_time) : and two ultrasonic sensors model HC-SR04
void (Ultrasonic, 2011).
int time = 0;
while(millis() - time < 3.2.1 Circuit Schema
max_time)
if(is_high(sensor) && The ultrasonic circuit schema is shown in figure 2. An
direction) Arduino UNO is responsible for collecting the
number_of_people++;
information captured by the ultrasonic sensors. This
else if(is_high(sensor) &&
!direction) circuit has two HC-SR04 sensors (ultrasonic sensor)
number_of_people--; connected with one Arduino Uno. The VCC is
end while supplied by the 5V Arduino pin and the GND of each
time - millis(); sensor is attached in the GND Arduino pin. Each
end procedure sensor has one Trigger and Echo pin. The first sensor
has Arduino digital pin 7 and 6 connected,
procedure main() : void respectively, to Trigger and Echo. Besides that, the
int number_of_people = 0; second one is attached with digital pin 9 on Trigger
while(device_on)
and digital pin 8 on Echo.
if(sensor_is_high(first))
The ultrasonic sensor constantly measures the
read_oposite_sensor(second, 1); distance of objects ahead, sending a signal through
else Trigger pin e receiving through Echo. When it is first
if(sensor_is_high(second)) turned on, the device measures the distance of all
read_oposite_sensor stationary objects in the environment. In this paper,
(first,0);

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this distance will be called environment distance. For example, if the delay time is set to 200
Besides that, when a person passes in front of the milliseconds, the device will verify how many
device, the distance measured will be named person persons are entering the room for 200ms, then it will
distance. verify how many persons are exiting the room for
The combining of these two sensors heads to four 200ms. The min_dist and max_dist represents the
different states: two sensors reading the environment distance range, this interval indicates the size (width)
distance, one reading environment and the other a of the corridor where people can pass.
person distance, and the two sensors detecting a Therefore, the algorithm is executed while the
person distance. When two devices read a person device is on, and checks if anybody has passed in any
distance, that means someone passed in front of it. direction. If so, this amount is incremented or
decremented from the people global counter. In each
iteration the direction is changed so the device can
read in both directions. To finish the procedure the
device sends to the server the captured information,
through the rest interface, in order to preserve a
historical ballast.

Algorithm 2: Ultrasonic Persons Counter

procedure read_ultrasonic_distance(bool
direction) : float distance
microsec = ultrasonic.timing();
distance =
ultrasonic.convert(direction,
Ultrasonic::CM);
return distance;
end procedure

procedure count_persons(float
Figure 2: Ultrasonic person counter circuit schema. min_distance, float max_distance, bool
direction): int amount_people
3.2.2 Algorithm
float distance_dir = 0;
float distance_oposite_dir = 0;
To perform people counting process the algorithm number_of_people = 0;
presented in Algorithm 2 was deployed in the circuit. do
It use two procedures and one library to compute the distance_dir =
information. The library is called “ultrasonic.h” (), read_ultrasonic_distance(direction);
and it is used to perform two types of processing: distance_oposite_dir =
read_ultrasonic_distance(!direct
• timing(): Gives the time passed between the ion);
emission and reception of an ultrasonic wave. if(same_distance_range(dis
• convert(bool, int): receives the sensor id (in this tance_dir,
case a boolean value), and the precision wanted distance_oposite_dir))
(in this case centimeters). number_of_people++;

The library was adapted to work with boolean while(distance > min_distance &&
values as a sensor id. Besides that, two procedures distance < max_distance)
were implemented; read_ultrasonic_distance(bool) return number_of_people;
end procedure
and count_persons(float,float,bool). The first one
uses the library functions to return the distance that an
object is from the sensor. The count_persons procedure main() : void
procedure counts the number of persons who passed
in front of one sensor. float delay = 200;
The main procedure uses the following pre- int max_dist = 100; //centimeters
int min_dist = 40; //centimeters
configured information: delay, min_dist and int direction = 1;
max_dist. Delay indicates the time when the amount_of_people = 0;
microcontroller has to switch the direction of reading.

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while(device_on) and direction of passage, in other words, entering or

while(time < delay) leaving.
if(direction)
amount_of_people +=
count_persons(min_dist,
max_dist,direction);
else
amount_of_people -=
count_persons(min_dist,
max_dist,direction);
end while
end while
direction = !direction;
send_to_server(amount_of_people); Figure 3: Scenario 1 - One person entering or leaving the
end procedure room.

The ultrasonic counter has limitations related to

the distance that the object is from the device. In other
words, if someone passes in front of the device at a
distance greater than one meter it usually loses
precision.
In addition to that, if there is a group of people
passing in front of the device, in the same distance
range, it is possible that the proposed device also
loses accuracy. Even with those limitations, for
counting a large numbers of people the ultrasonic
Figure 4: Scenario 2 - One person entering and other person
approach was more consistent than motion leaving the room at the same time.
technology based approach.

4 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
4.1 Experimental Environment
In order to compare the proposed solutions in a real
scenario, all IoT person counters were installed in the
same laboratory room. The devices were deployed
next to the door, objectifying only to capture data
related to the entry and exit of people. This room is
used by fifteen distinct persons at different times of Figure 5: Scenario 3 - Two persons entering or leaving the
day. room at the same time.
The proposed implementations were analyzed in
relation of the accuracy of the information provided
by the IoT devices. Experiments were conducted in
the following approach:
• Controlled tests: Devices were tested in specific
scenarios with minimum external interference.
These scenarios can be seen in Figures 3,4,
5,6,7,8 and 9.
The scenarios proposed for the execution of controlled
tests were designed in order to analyse the
effectiveness of implementations in different Figure 6: Scenario 4 - Two persons entering or leaving the
situations. Thus, the scenarios differ in number of room in a short time interval.
people, time interval between the passage of persons

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 Evaluation of an Arduino-based IoT Person Counter

The experimental results also indicate that in

scenarios with heavy human traffic both
implementations have an undermining accuracy.
Besides that, in scenarios where there are several
persons passing at the same time the two approaches
recognize as one individual.

Table 2: Accuracy of proposed implementations.

Figure 7: Scenario 5 - One person entering and other person Accuracy Result: Accuracy Result:
leaving the room in a short time interval. Scenario
Ultrasonic Motion
1 90% 81%
2 0% 0%
3 0% 0%
4 87% 50.3%
5 63.2% 49.8%
6 58.7% 12.4%
7 0% 0%

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK
Figure 8: Scenario 6 - A group of N people entering and The research work presented in this paper proposes a
another group of M people leaving the room in a short time IoT person counter implemented with two different
interval. technologies, motion and ultrasonic. The information
provided by person counter device can be used in
several scenarios, such as to ensure security of access
to a room, or to regulate the temperature of a room.
Algorithms have been suggested to carry out the
management of the information provided by the
sensors. As result of the proposal, experiments
indicate that in controlled environments, where there
are not many people transiting, both approaches have
a considerable accuracy. In contrast, scenarios in
which the flux of people is significant, both
applications have an impoverishment of its accuracy.
Given this scenario, where devices are
susceptible to imprecision of the information
Figure 9: Scenario 7 - A group of N people entering and
another group of M people leaving the room, all at the same captured from the environment, it is understood that
time. it is not possible to send information, continuously
and accurately, over a given situation occurring in the
Table 2 presents the result of accuracy evaluation environment, with only one IoT device. In this sense,
for all controlled tests. Each row represent a specific for future work it is proposed an IoT network person
scenario evaluated by motion and ultrassonic counter (INPC). The INPC utilizes information
approaches. provided by different devices on the network to infer
For scenarios where only one individual passes in how many people are in a certain place. Such
front of the device, in a controlled time frequency, the implementation will take advantage of information
devices obtained results next to those expected, provided by an IoT authenticator (based on RFID
indicating that they can be used in real environments. technology), an IoT person counter (based on motion
Both motion and ultrasonic technologies have a technology), and an IoT face recognizer (based on
inactivation time range limitation, respectively, of 2,5 face recognition algorithms). Those three devices will
seconds and 500 milliseconds. send information to the network and all the
information combined tends to indicate with a

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better accuracy and precision the amount of the Sensor/HC-SR04/HC-SR04_Ultrasonic_Module_

number of people in a certain place. User_Guide.pdf
Wijk, O., Jensfelt, P., Christensen, H.I., (1998).
Triangulation based fusion of ultrasonic sensor data.
IEEE International Conference on Robotic and
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Automation.
W.Arduino, What is Arduino. On-line reference acessed in
The authors wish to thank the Brazilian research, 19/02/2016. https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/
development and innovation Agencies CAPES Introduction
(Grant FORTE 23038.007604/2014-69),FINEP
(Grant RENASIC/PROTO 01.12.0555.00) and
PNPD/CAPES - Programa Nacional de Pos-
Doutorado/CAPES for their support to this work.

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