Gateshead Council chooses pedestrian & vehicle counters from Retail Sensing

Gateshead Council are now continually monitoring pedestrian footfall at eight locations around the town. To do so they chose a Retail Sensing people counting system. The council are also using the same system to automatically count vehicles and determine how road closures affect traffic elsewhere.

Gateshead – camera monitoring a counting zone

Our partners R-Com Technical installed the counting system. Cameras on lampposts monitor the area below. The Retail Sensing VT counters detect people in the monitoring zone and count entries and exits. The counts are transmitted over the Internet-of-Things. They are combined with weather and air quality data from Gateshead monitoring stations, so the council can analyse how environmental conditions affects footfall.

Similarly for the traffic monitoring, the counters detect vehicles in the camera’s video stream. Information is compared for different locations over time. Counting proceeds 24 hours a day.

During people counting, no individuals are identified, complying with data protection regulations (GDPR). Only footfall numbers are saved.

Gateshead is a large town in the north east of England. The new system gives the council invaluable data about the town, letting planners study the flow of people and vehicles.

Retail Sensing

Retail Sensing manufacture the Video Turnstile people counting, vehicle sensing and smart city equipment. Our systems not only measure footfall and traffic, but monitor queues, display occupancy, track shoppers around stores, show heat maps of most visited areas, record passenger numbers, count pedestrians and provide retail intelligence and key performance indicators.