Description

People counting / occupancy estimation predicts the number of humans in a sensing region — as a binary (present / absent), bucketed (0 / 1 / 2-5 / 6+), or fully integer count. It is the most directly thesis-relevant CSI inference task and the one the BLE-calibrated CSI architecture is designed to make robust. Pipelines fall along a spectrum from hand-crafted feature regressors to density-map CNNs.

When it's used

  • Smart-building HVAC control
  • Real-time occupancy dashboards
  • Capacity / safety monitoring
  • Calibration target for the BLE-CSI fusion pipeline

Limitations

  • Generalisation across rooms / hardware is poor without calibration
  • Multi-person separation degrades quickly above 5–6 occupants
  • Static people are under-counted by motion-based features

Source Papers

  • ren2023_8cfe — radar-based people counting
  • chen2018_97e0 — CSI occupancy estimator
  • esrafiliannajafabadi2022_1342 — people-counting pipeline benchmark
  • jung2025_3f2e — recent people-counting CSI work
  • mondal2023_7f7a — classroom occupancy via CSI

22 vault papers use this method

Titles and DOIs only — no abstracts, no analyses.

  • Understanding and Modeling of WiFi Signal Based Human Activity Recognition 2015 DOI ↗
  • DASECount: Domain-Agnostic Sample-Efficient Wireless Indoor Crowd Counting via Few-Shot Learning 2023 DOI ↗
  • Toward Accurate Crowd Counting in Large Surveillance Areas Based on Passive WiFi Sensing 2023 DOI ↗
  • Fast and Robust Stationary Crowd Counting With Commodity WiFi 2026 DOI ↗
  • A CSI Dataset for Wireless Human Sensing on 80 MHz Wi-Fi Channels 2023 DOI ↗
  • Grouped People Counting Using mm-Wave FMCW MIMO Radar 2023 DOI ↗
  • Towards Energy Efficient Wireless Sensing by Leveraging Ambient Wi-Fi Traffic 2024 DOI ↗
  • Fundamentals, Algorithms, and Technologies of Occupancy Detection for Smart Buildings Using IoT Sensors 2024 DOI ↗
  • Human Sensing by Using Radio Frequency Signals: A Survey on Occupancy and Activity Detection 2023 DOI ↗
  • Accurate occupancy estimation with WiFi and bluetooth/BLE packet capture 2019 DOI ↗
  • WiFi as Infrastructure: Valuation Impact of CSI Sensing on Smart Buildings and REIT Portfolios 2026 DOI ↗
  • CSI-based Passenger Counting on Public Transport Vehicles with Multiple Transceivers 2024 DOI ↗
  • A Tutorial on Privacy, RCM and Its Implications in WLAN 2024 DOI ↗
  • EasyCount: Crowd Counting Based on Easy Deployment Using Commodity Wi-Fi 2024 DOI ↗
  • Investigation of Environment Dependence in Wi-Fi CSI-Based Crowd Counting Systems 2024 DOI ↗
  • A roadmap for the future of crowd safety research and practice: Introducing the Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety and the imperative of a Vision Zero target 2023 DOI ↗
  • Sensing Technologies for Crowd Management, Adaptation, and Information Dissemination in Public Transportation Systems: A Review 2023 DOI ↗
  • Impact of occupancy prediction models on building HVAC control system performance: Application of machine learning techniques 2022 DOI ↗
  • Estimating indoor crowd density and movement behavior using WiFi sensing 2022 DOI ↗
  • BLE Can See: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for RF-based Indoor Occupancy Detection 2021 DOI ↗
  • A Survey on Detection, Tracking and Identification in Radio Frequency-Based Device-Free Localization 2019 DOI ↗
  • A Survey on Detection, Tracking and Identification in Radio Frequency-Based Device-Free Localization 2019 DOI ↗