Patent ID: 7176441

Claim:
A counting system for counting the number of passing objects in a path, comprising: a light emitter for irradiating a line which extends along a width direction of said path with a slit ray; an image capturing part for photographing said line to obtain an image; a line data generator for generating one-dimensional line data indicative of an irradiation state of said slit ray on said line from the image obtained by said image capturing part; a detection part for detecting said passing objects on the basis of said one-dimensional line data; and a counter for counting said number of said passing objects on the basis of said line data detected by said detection part, wherein said line data generator selects a statistical representative value from values of pixels of each pixel column arranged in a second direction orthogonal to a first direction corresponding to a direction of said line in said image, and sets said statistical representative value as a value of a pixel in said line data in the same position as each pixel column.