Riverwalk shopping mall is a festival marketplace located in New Orleans. As part of the pedestrian counting system, photoelectric sensors were installed at the mall entrances to record pedestrian flows entering and exiting the mall. This paper describes the system and presents a nonlinear model that correlates manual pedestrian counts with the corresponding sensor data. Two types of sensor data were recorded: (a) number of sensor breaks and (b) number of busy cycles. The number of sensor breaks was found to be a better explanatory variable than the number of busy cycles, which depends on the size and speed of the object that crosses the sensor beam. Issues relating to model development include simultaneous crossings of the beam by multiple shoppers and the effect of varying entrance widths on model parameters. The nonlinear relationship between actual pedestrian counts and their associated sensor data accounts for simultaneous crossings, and hypothesis testing revealed that the model is invariant under varying entrance widths.
Abstract