Hong Kong Tourism Board Dragon Boat Event — How Mansfield Used People Counting to Track Foot Traffic

mansfield
Jul 2
2 min read

The Hong Kong Tourism Board held a dragon boat event from June 27 to 28. Thousands of the world’s top dragon boat athletes gathered in Hong Kong, competing beneath the skyline of Victoria Harbour. While the event was exciting and highly anticipated, it also presented real operational challenges. Organizers needed to accurately understand when and how people entered and exited, as well as the distribution of peak times, to support on-site crowd management and flow coordination.

For this event, Mansfield served as the People Counting solution provider. Using computer vision, we translated what cameras captured—people moving through the venue—into structured, actionable data: who entered, who exited, and when those movements occurred.

Our People Counting Method: Detection + Tracking + Entry/Exit Counting Line + Time Aggregation

The workflow can be summarized into four steps to ensure the logic is clear, traceable, and aligned with on-site operations.

1) Person Detection (Detection)

For every video frame, the system detects individuals and outputs a bounding box for each person.

2) Multi-Object Tracking (Tracking)

Next, the system links the same person across consecutive frames into a track ID, helping avoid double counting (for example, due to frame-to-frame changes) and reducing the risk of missing people caused by brief occlusions.

3) Counting Rule Using a Measurement Line (Entry/Exit Rule)

At the entrance or passage area, a virtual measurement line (one line or two lines depending on the setup) is defined. The system determines movement based on whether the tracked person’s center point crosses the line and the direction of travel:

Crossing from one side to the other → counted as “Entry”
Crossing in the opposite direction → counted as “Exit ”

4) Time Binning (Time Aggregation)

Finally, events are aggregated into fixed time intervals (e.g., every 15 minutes) using their timestamps. This produces time-segment statistics so organizers can clearly observe crowd flow patterns and identify peak periods.

Turning On-Site Crowds into Useful Management Data

In large events, crowd management requires more than just total headcount. Organizers also need timing insights—such as when entries spike, how exit patterns change, and what the busiest windows look like. Mansfield’s measurement approach is designed around these needs, helping make crowd data more useful for decision-making.

Event Recap: Supporting the Hong Kong Tourism Board with Data to Enhance Experience

Looking back at June 27–28, Mansfield is pleased to have supported the Hong Kong Tourism Board in deploying a People Counting solution that operationalizes people-entry and exit measurement. By combining detection, tracking, entry/exit line counting, and time aggregation, we helped turn camera observations into clear and quantifiable results.

If you’d like to understand how the solution was optimized for this specific venue—such as entrance placement, passage design, and camera angles—we’d be happy to share details.