Counting People with Andrew Farah

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If you operate a restaurant, you want to know how many people are inside your restaurant at any given time. You also want to be able to know your occupancy if you operate a movie theater, coffee shop, or apparel store.

Knowing how many people are in your building can answer several business-related questions. Do you need to unlock an additional entrance? Should you open another store? Do you really need a building this big?

This might sound like a simple question, but how do you solve the problem of counting people inside of a building?

A naive approach to counting people is to use video cameras and count the number of people entering and exiting the building. Machine learning algorithms are good at classifying humans. But the downside of this is that you have to put cameras anywhere you want a people-counter. There are many situations where you would want to count the number of people where a camera is not acceptable. What if you wanted to count people in a privacy preserving way? What if you wanted to obscure any identifiable traits of a person that you were counting?

Density is a device for counting people. It sits above a doorway and counts the people who are entering or exiting the building. Andrew Farah is the CEO at Density, and in today’s episode he explains why the problem of counting people is harder than it sounds, and how the Density people counter functions.

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