Project Setup

By clicking on "Add Demo Project" in the lower right corner of the project list window, it is possible to create a project that is already pre configured. Demo projects are available to showcase some potential use cases of Percept for various applications and to provide an orientation of how a complete project can look like without the need to go through the setup wizard first.

After clicking on the button, a pop-up is shown. Here, the only needed steps are:

More information about these zones can be found in Step 4 - Zone Management.

From the pop-up, click "Cancel" to cancel the project creation or "Create" to create the selected demo project. In the second case, the new project can now be seen in the project list and started directly, as explained in Step 7 - Manage existing Projects.

For marker based registration a spherical object is used as a marker and access to the area in field of view of the lidars is needed. During the registration process the marker needs to be placed in the overlapping area between the corresponding devices. At least three detections of the marker on different positions in the overlapping area are required to reliably register the point clouds. This method works best in a static environment, where only the marker and the person moving the marker to different positions are present.

The marker-based registration shows you two point clouds in parallel, you can select which point clouds you want to display using the drop down menu. Select two point clouds which have an overlap and then start placing the marker in the overlapping area.

The semi-automatic registration is especially useful in crowded environments, or if you can’t use the marker based methods and in scenarios with not much overlap. If you are used to viewing 3D point clouds it might even be faster than the marker based method.

The semi-automatic method allows the user to transform every point cloud, with the goal of them matching roughly together. Then in the next step, Percept will refine the transformation so that it is accurately registered. In case it is needed, there is also the possibility of skipping the refinement and directly moving on to the next step. In this case, the point clouds will be kept in the manually set positions and no refinement will be applied.

Registration step can be done again in case its result is not satisfying. For the new Registration attempt, you can choose whether you want to use the previous transformation or restart from scratch. The registration button will be enabled only for multi sensor setup.

Discard all the changes and reset the point cloud to its initial position.

If alignment is satisfying, click on "Set Alignment", which will take you to the next step.

The Pass Through Counter Zone counts the number of objects that moves through the zone in a specific direction. In order for a counting event to trigger, the object needs to start outside the zone, move through the zone and fully exit the zone again. The Pass Through Counter Zone can either accumulate all counted objects or show only the currently counted objects. This can be configured by activating or deactivating the 'Accumulate the Counter Zone' option in the Pass Through Counter Zone definition, as can be seen in Example of the user interface to create a Pass Through Counter zone.

The Zone has a direction to specify what movement will be counted as entry and what movement will be counted as exit (see screenshot below). A movement in the direction of the arrow will be an counted as entry, while a movement in the opposite direction will be counted as an exit.

The Appearance/Disappearance Counter Zone will count if an object moves into a zone and then disappears (outbound) or if an object appears in a zone and then leaves the zone (inbound). Use cases are e.g. a person entering an elevator or an escalator. Another use case would be the entrance into an area which is not covered by a LiDAR, e.g. a store where you want to count how many people are entering or exiting, but you do not have enough coverage to use a Pass Through Counter Zone. The Appearance/Disappearance Counter Zone can either accumulate all counted objects or show only the currently counted objects. This can be configured by activating or deactivating the 'Accumulate the Counter Zone' option in the Appearance/Disappearance Counter Zone definition. An example of this for the Pass Through Counter Zone is shown in figure Example of the user interface to create a Pass Through Counter zone and for the Appearance/Disappearance Counter Zone there is an equivalent option during the zone creation.

Objects appearing inside the zone and disappearing inside the zone, without leaving the zone will not get counted. Objects entering the zone and leaving the zone will also not get counted.

The Current Objects Counter Zone counts the amount of detected objects inside a zone for every frame.

The Security Zone works with points rather than with objects. While an object can consist of e.g. 50 or 100 points, the security zone decides based on the number of points if an intrusion is happening or not. The threshold level defining the minimum number of points before an alarm is raised can be defined by the user.

The Occupancy zone works similar to the Security Zone, with the difference that the output message will be different. This zone is for e.g. parking spot monitoring where you want to get a message that a specific spot is occupied rather than an alarm message.

The Volume Measurement Zone provides a method to measure the volume inside the zone. It is important that the point cloud is aligned on the grid for the volume measurement zone to work reliably. You can specify the grid resolution used to calculate the volume. The grid resolution will influence how accurate the result is, a smaller grid resolution will therefore be more accurate but it will have higher processing cost. If you have a very large Volume Measurement Zone to improve the performance you could use a higher resolution, otherwise the default resolution should perform well for most use cases. Note that a value smaller then the point to point distance generated in the point cloud will not increase the accuracy.

It is also possible to manually define the tare volume for the zone, this value will be subtracted from the measured total (gross) volume. With this it is possible to remove objects standing around or walls which are not intended to get measured. Also it is possible to measure negative volumes.

The option to manually set the tare volume is not only available during the zone setup/edit, but also an automatic option is available during the runtime of the project. If your project contains volume zones, a button will appear on the bottom-right corner of the project visualization page. By clicking on it, a pop up will appear displaying the list of volume zones in the project.

By selecting one of the volume zones, the current total (gross) volume will be displayed.

If you click on save, the total (gross) volume will be set as the tare volume for this zone. This will be subtracted from the total (gross) volume and will be displayed in the Zone Output on the top-right corner. This process is similar to manually setting the tare volume of a zone during the setup/edit of the zone but the value can be calculated automatically.

In the project setup and in the project edit mode you can create, delete or change the zones.

If you don’t have a zone created you can either create one or if you don’t want to have a zone at all you can go to the next wizard step with the Save Zones button.

By adding a zone, Percept will open a dialog where you can select the different zone types. Select the zone type and enter a name for your zone. Press "Save" to create the zone.

Now since we created a Pass Through Counter zone make sure that its arrow shows into the direction you want to count as entry, have a look into the Pass Through Counter Zone description for details.

There are now two additional buttons to delete or edit the created zones.

In the transform control panel you will find a copy button for each zone, with which you can create a copy of a zone including the zone type, size and orientation. The copy of the zone will be positioned next to the original zone. A name will be suggested for the new zone but it can be modified to different name if needed.

Add all the zones you need to your project.

The Security Zone and Occupancy Zone will have an additional field where you can set the minimum points threshold.

Click on Save Zones to continue with the next wizard step or finish your project edit.

Here you can select if you want to enable auto starting the project at the start of the Percept. If it is enabled, the project will be automatically initiated on the startup of Percept.

Here you can select if you want to enable time synchronization of the devices or not. If it is enabled, Percept will synchronize the device/s with an ntp server. This ntp server has to be set in the WebGUI of each LiDAR device.

Parameters, e.g. for Clustering or Tracking, can be optimized to suit your application. By default, the parameters are set to perform good on object tracking use cases with slow objects, like walking people.

With Select Parameter Set you can load parameters for different type of applications. These suggestions are a good starting point for your application and can be further optimized, see the following sections which describe the advanced options in more detail.

Currently we have the following parameter sets:

Background subtraction is used to separate the point cloud into foreground and background. Therefore you could also call it foreground detection. The background stores the non relevant features in a scene e.g. all the points generated by static elements in the environment, while the foreground has the relevant features e.g. the points generated by an object entering the scene. The foreground points are then used for clustering to detect objects.

Percept provides two main types of background subtraction algorithms.

The point cloud filter can remove noise in the scene and therefore improve object detection. The radius outlier filter will eliminate all points that do not have a certain amount of neighbor points in a given radius around that point.

Clustering identifies dense point cloud regions in the foreground point cloud. Each dense region is called a 'cluster' and Percept considers it as an object. Percept provides several clustering methods.

The Tracking parameters are set to work with slow objects, like walking people. You can adjust the parameters to your needs. The following parameters are available.

Percept can save the detected objects and/or the generated states (e.g. an alarm) to files. The following options are available.

The files can be found in your Percept directory under /data/projects/project_uuid/file_stream/.

Percept can send the detected objects and/or the generated states to an MQTT Broker. The following options are available.

You will receive the MQTT messages on the following Topics, e.g. for Json encoding:

If you click on the play button, the project will be started. It will generate the selected output and run until you stop it.

After starting your project a button will appear to visualize and stop the project. If you click on the visualization button, you will get redirected to a visualization page, where you can see the generated Point Cloud of the LiDAR device/s used and the status messages generated by the configured zones, see Visualize your Project for details.

Percept allows you to change the following parts of your configured Project:

The interface is the same as in the setup phase described above.

You can select what configuration to download. Either the zone configuration, point cloud transformation, or both. The output format can be Protobuf or JSON. See Output Encoding Description for a description of the output encoding.

The zone configuration might be helpful:

The point cloud transformation might be helpful:

Removes your created project.

The project visualization will use the 3D viewer to show you the point cloud and the detection zones of a running project. This allows you to obtain a live overview about what is happening in the scene and if the setup/configuration is working as intended.