Occupancy estimation is the task of determining the number of people present in a given space using indirect sensing signals, most commonly by analyzing perturbations in WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) caused by human presence and movement. Accurate occupancy estimation is critical for applications such as smart building management, energy efficiency, classroom monitoring, and public safety, driving significant research into passive, non-intrusive sensing methods that require no user cooperation or dedicated hardware worn by occupants. Key variants of the problem include binary occupancy detection (occupied vs. vacant), coarse-grained counting across small ranges such as one to seven individuals in a room, and fine-grained crowd counting of larger stationary or mobile groups, with stationary crowd estimation being a particularly challenging subproblem because minimal gross motion must be distinguished through subtle physiological signals such as natural body fidgeting.
Source Papers
- A Framework to Estimate Classroom Occupancy using WiFi Channel State Information ↗ — A Framework to Estimate Classroom Occupancy using WiFi Chann
- A Novel Device-Free Counting Method Based on Channel Status Information ↗ — A Novel Device-Free Counting Method Based on Channel Status
- A Tutorial on Privacy, RCM and Its Implications in WLAN ↗ — A Tutorial on Privacy, RCM and Its Implications in WLAN
- Fast and Robust Stationary Crowd Counting With Commodity WiFi ↗ — Fast and Robust Stationary Crowd Counting With Commodity WiF
- Guiding Wi-Fi Sensor Placement for Enhanced CSI-Based Sensing in Stationary Crowd Counting ↗ — Guiding Wi-Fi Sensor Placement for Enhanced CSI-Based Sensin
- MMCOUNT: Stationary Crowd Counting System Based on Commodity Millimeter-Wave Radar ↗ — MMCOUNT: Stationary Crowd Counting System Based on Commodity
- OPERAnet, a multimodal activity recognition dataset acquired from radio frequency and vision-based sensors ↗ — OPERAnet, a multimodal activity recognition dataset acquired
- Occupancy Prediction in IoT-Enabled Smart Buildings: Technologies, Methods, and Future Directions ↗ — Occupancy Prediction in IoT-Enabled Smart Buildings: Technol