Compare how much each area is used

Which aisle of a shop, which corner of a room or which bay of a car park is used most? Give each area its own zone and compare their occupied time. This guide splits the corridor floor into three zones.

Step 1. Draw three zones

1. Open the Scene Builder of the Corridor camera. If you imported the route scene in guide 11, you can keep it. The new zones are added to it.
2. Click New experiment, name it Floor use, keep Person and click Create experiment.
3. Press Z and draw the left third of the floor. Click where the back wall meets the floor at the far left, then a third of the way across along the foot of the wall. Then click the bottom edge straight below, and the bottom-left corner of the picture. Double-click to finish.
4. In the inspector, set Name to Left and Ignore visits shorter than to 1.
5. Draw the middle third the same way and name it Centre. Draw the right third and name it Right. Give both the same 1-second minimum.
6. Click Save in the top bar, or press Ctrl+S.

Neighbouring zones may touch. Corners close to the edge of the picture snap onto it.

Step 2. Run and compare

1. Click Start and wait for the clip to finish.
2. Click Results. The Zones (occupancy and dwell) panel lists the three zones, and also Centre floor if you kept the route scene.
3. Compare Occupied time first. It tells how long each area had anyone in it. Visits tells how often people came.

With the recommended detector the sample gives these results:

People used the left and centre of the floor about equally and the right side less. They stayed longest on the left, near the door.

Step 3. Look over several runs

1. Open Analysis and pick Floor use in the Experiment list.
2. The Zones panel adds up all runs of the experiment.
3. For live cameras, the occupied time of each zone is also split by clock hour, which shows the busy hours of each area.

Parking bays

The same method measures the use of parking bays, with a camera that looks down on the car park.

1. Create the experiment. Under Objects to track, untick Person and tick Car. Tick Truck too if vans park there.
2. Draw one zone per bay. Follow the painted lines, and include the part of the bay where the bottom of a parked car is seen from the camera.
3. Name the zones after the bay numbers, such as Bay 12.
4. On each zone set Ignore visits shorter than to 120 seconds. A car that only drives through the bay is then not counted.
5. To flag overstays, set Flag visits longer than to the limit, for example 7200 for two hours. Each overstay then creates a Dwell exceeded event, counted as Long visits flagged in the zones table.
6. On the experiment page, under Advanced settings, set Processing FPS to 1. Parked cars do not move, so one frame per second is plenty.
7. A parked car can be hidden for a while by a passing van. Raise Frames to keep searching for a lost object so the visit continues, for example to 120, which is 2 minutes at 1 frame per second.
8. Click Save at the top of the experiment page.

Next

Guide 13 records sequences, such as passing the entrance and then entering the centre of the room.