A Comparative Field Study: Commercial Versus Low-cost Camera-based Automated Passenger Counting systems.

Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) systems in public transport are useful in collecting information that can help improve the efficiency of transport networks. Focusing on video-based passenger counting, the aim of this study was to evaluate and compare an existing APC system, declared to be highly accurate (98%), with a newly developed low-cost APC system operating under the same real-world conditions. For this comparison a low-cost APC system using a Raspberry Pi with a camera and a YOLOv5 object detection algorithm was developed, and an on-field experiment was done in collaboration with the pub-lic transport companies operating in the cities of Turin and Asti, Italy. The ex-periment shows that the low-cost system was able to achieve an accuracy of 72.27% and 74.59% respectively for boarding and alighting, while the tested commercial APC system had an accuracy, respectively, of 53.11% and 55.29%. These findings suggest that current APC systems might not meet expectations under real-world conditions, while low-cost systems could potentially perform at the same level of accuracy or even better than very expensive commercial systems.