How can I detect and track people using OpenCV?

Question

I have a camera that will be stationary, pointed at an indoors area. People will walk past the camera, within about 5 meters of it. Using OpenCV, I want to

Answer 1

This is similar to a project we did as part of a Computer Vision course, and I can tell you right now that it is a hard problem to get right.

You could use foreground/background segmentation, find all blobs and then decide that they are a person. The problem is that it will not work very well since people tend to go together, go past each other and so on, so a blob might very well consist of two persons and then you will see that blob splitting and merging as they walk along.

You will need some method of discriminating between multiple persons in one blob. This is not a problem I expect anyone being able to answer in a single SO-post.

My advice is to dive into the available research and see if you can find anything there. The problem is not unsolvavble considering that there exists products which do this: Autoliv has a product to detect pedestrians using an IR-camera on a car, and I have seen other products which deal with counting customers entering and exiting stores.