People Counting System at the Terabee offices

Underused space is a waste of money. Estimates suggest that by optimizing their use of space, businesses could reduce their needs by around 30%, translating to a significant reduction in costs.

At Terabee, we supply ToF sensing solutions for a range of applications, including people counting. We’ve also developed a people counting algorithm that is reliably generating 98% people counting accuracy, or better!

In one of our first people counting projects, we tested our Terabee 3Dcam 80x60 on the main entrance of a local building and partner of ours, InnoGex. This helped them measure the success of their conferences and events. The technology proved its power and InnoGex are currently using their people counting system to measure event attendance and optimize their staffing levels accordingly.

Now, we are enhancing our solution further. And where better to test it than in our own offices?

We hoped that people counting could help us optimize our staff planning and use our space more efficiently. To do this, we needed to understand how our staff uses our premises. We also wanted to know if our buildings are the right size for our needs and whether we have the right number of meeting and call rooms. To meet all these demands, we needed a people counting system that could provide detailed data about how we use our office buildings and rooms.

We installed single-board computers with our cameras which applied our custom algorithm to ToF data, detecting and counting people entering and leaving spaces. Our people counting system can detect multiple people moving in and out of a space simultaneously and ‘dense’ people traffic at busy times or in congested doorways. As a part of this, our background suppression feature rejects stationary objects and bystanders in the camera’s field of view to further improve count accuracy.

Data from our devices is pushed to our online dashboard every minute via WiFi or ethernet. The dashboard allows users to visualize people count data so that it is easy to understand. In our case, we use it to see how Terabee’s office space is being used over time, and key decision-makers at Terabee can access our people counting data from anywhere, at anytime. One of the things we quickly discovered was that our open-plan meeting area was poorly utilised, but that small meeting rooms were heavily utilized, so we converted the open-plan space into two new meeting rooms. We also learned when our peak work hours are and which buildings and facilities are used in which parts of the day. This data will help us make decisions about our future real-estate and office needs.

Our internal people counting solutions may already be up and running, but we aren’t done yet! We’d like to connect people counting data to our heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems to reduce our energy consumption and reduce our carbon footprint.

We are also continuously working on improving our people counting system. Currently, we’re making the people counting system easier to install and set up.