Object counting with Kerberos Cloud
By: Cédric Verstraeten
Tags: Machine Learning, TensorFlow, Computer Vision, Video Surveillance, Counting

Welcome to Kerberos Cloud

The Kerberos Cloud is our SAAS to manage and monitor video surveillance cameras in the cloud (or in your private data center, actually where-ever you want).

The idea is that you connect one or more cameras to our platform, through the concept of Kerberos Agents. Once you connected your Kerberos Agents to the Kerberos Cloud solution, the platform will do all the heavy lifting for you. A limited number of features included are:

Monitoring of devices (when they go offline),

Sequencing and grouping of recordings,

Advanced search capabilities,

Live streaming,

Notifications,

Machine learning,

and, many others.

One of the new features is now object counting.

1. Object counting

Once you have a Kerberos Cloud account, and a gold subscription, you will have access to the object counting functionality. If you have one or more devices connected, you can navigate to the devices tab, and open a specific device of choice.

Once you opened the device detail page, you will see several tabs at the top of the page: Details and Counting. Select the Counting tab, to configure the object counting for the selected device.

The concept: A counting zone

The idea of our object counting function is that you can create multiple counting zones for each device. A counting zone is a set of counting segments, which are connected.

A counting zone is interesting to track the path of a specific object. For example when you have a promotion in your retail store, you could verify the success of the promotion by verifying the walking directions of your customers. A counting zone could also be as simple as counting incoming and outgoing objects.

Two counting zones, who can count incoming and outgoing objects.

The concept: Types of segments

As described previously a counting zone consist of multiple segments. A segment can be of following three types: incoming, intermediate and outgoing.

Three different segment types: incoming (green), intermediate (yellow) and outgoing (red).

The idea of having different segment types is to make different use cases possible.

Entrance Counting: By adding an incoming and outgoing segment, the platform will count the objects when crossing both lines. The sequence of crossing will determine if it’s an incoming or outgoing object. When an object first crosses the outgoing (red) segment and then the incoming (green) segment, it’s counted as an incoming object. When first crossing the incoming (green) segment and then the outgoing (red) segment, it’s counted as an outgoing object. Traject Counting: Instead of simply counting incoming and outgoing objects, you can also measure the traject of a specific object. By adding one or more intermediate segments in between, the platform will calculate if objects are crossing these intermediate segments as well. Multi entrance counting: It’s also possible to have have multiple incoming and outgoing segments in a counting zone.

2. Dashboard and Measuring

Once you’ve setup the preferred counting zones for all your devices. You can start evaluating and monitoring the object counting on a high-level view. When navigating to the counting page, in the left navigation menu, you will land on the dashboard page. On this page insights are given regarding your object counting settings made in the previous step.