Pa-Count: Passenger Counting in Vehicles Using Wi-Fi Signals

Abstract

Passenger counting is crucial for many applications such as vehicle scheduling and traffic capacity assessment. However, most of the existing solutions are either high-cost, privacy invasive or not suitable for passengers the vehicle scenarios. In this work, we propose the Pa-Count, an effective real-time Passenger Counting system deployed inside the vehicle via using Wi-Fi CSI (Channel State Information). Specifically, in Pa-Count, we design a set of combined filters to eliminate environmental interference and enhance CSI quality. In so doing, we can identify the fluctuation of weak CSI caused by passengers' subtle movement, i.e., the fidgeting, and then obtain the distribution of fidgeting period and silent period. Following that, we describe the subtle movements of passengers via power law with exponential cutoff distribution and establish a counting model based on the queuing theory. A mathematical inference method with a priori probability is devised to calculate the number of real-time passengers through CSI. We evaluate the performance of the Pa-Count by conducting a set of experiments in real-world vehicle scenarios (including private car and subway). Experimental results show that Pa-Count can achieve robust performance with an average accuracy of over 92%.