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Abstract While various sensors have been deployed to monitor vehicular flows, sensing pedestrian movement is still nascent. Yet walking is a significant mode of travel in many cities, especially those in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Understanding pedestrian volumes and flows is essential for designing safer and more attractive pedestrian infrastructure and for controlling periodic overcrowding. This study discusses a new approach to scale up urban sensing of people with the help of novel audio-based technology. It assesses the benefits and limitations of microphone-based sensors as compared to other forms of pedestrian sensing. A large-scale dataset called ASPED is presented, which includes high-quality audio recordings along with video recordings used for labeling the pedestrian count data. The baseline analyses highlight the promise of using audio sensors for pedestrian tracking, although algorithmic and technological improvements to make the sensors practically usable continue. This study also demonstrates how the data can be leveraged to predict pedestrian trajectories. Finally, it discusses the use cases and scenarios where audio-based pedestrian sensing can support better urban and transportation planning. 

The detection and counting of pedestrians plays a central role for the design of smart cities. Although the use of cameras for this task has been shown to have high accuracy, they come at a high cost and are susceptible to challenges such as poor lighting, fog, and obstructed views. Our study investigates audio-based pedestrian detection, combining potentially low cost sensors with advanced machine learning based audio analysis algorithms. With an audio sensor installed along the walkway, machine learning algorithms can tell from the audio whether there is a pedestrian or not, or how far the pedestrian is from the sensor. Results show the general feasibility of audio-based pedestrian detection but fall short of reaching the accuracy levels of video-based detection.