AI Could Transform the Science of Counting Crowds

The Trump administration's controversial attempt to declare its recent presidential inauguration as having "the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period," has inadvertently highlighted the fact that counting crowds remains a painstaking and inexact science. But the rise of artificial intelligence could soon spare crowd scientists the task of manually counting heads. An early glimpse of how artificial intelligence (AI) could help count crowds appeared in 2013. University of Central Florida researchers showed how computer software based on machine learning can swiftly provide automated headcount estimates for crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Such AI tools still have room for improvement in terms of achieving accurate headcounts based on images.