Las Vegas has a long history of hosting large numbers of people, but a major event held over a weekend in April 2022 became one of the largest gatherings the city has ever seen. The event attracted several hundred thousand visitors and fans from around the country. This high-profile event was another example of the kind of in-person events returning in earnest after several years of COVID-related shutdowns and capacity limitations. The production of the weekend event was such a grand undertaking that Las Vegas closed a part of the strip, something they do not do for just any event.

The three-day event space comprised a large area of the strip and several casino properties. The sheer magnitude of the event – including the expansive footprint and the number of attendees – posed a unique challenge for event organizers. Tickets for many of the individual events and performances during the weekend were free, but the city imposed strict capacity limits. The challenge was to monitor the flow of people in and out of event spaces and keep an accurate count of people in a defined area, especially when a particular event spanned an entire day. For example, the activities of the main event occurred during the day, then the evening concluded with concerts at several venues. Attendees would attend the main event, held within the event footprint, then return for the evening concerts.

The organizer challenged Unified Command, a leader in temporary video surveillance deployment and monitoring for every size event, to track, count, and accurately report on the number of attendees at any given time. Unified Command leveraged Lumeo’s custom video analytic platform to process video feeds from multiple cameras and to keep an accurate count of the number of people leaving a defined area.

To tackle this challenge, organizers had metal detectors installed at entry points to not only check for unauthorized materials but to also count people as they entered. Using cameras to count people entering an area proved difficult due to the number of people entering at once, which increased the risk of undercounting or over counting the number of unique individuals. The metal detectors provided a controlled ingress checkpoint to help improve count. The metal detectors the perfect guard at the entrances, keeping an accurate count of those entering at any given time during the day. This solution, however, got the organizers only to the 50-yard line – they still needed a way to accurately count people leaving the venue through gates en-masse.

Lumeo’s “no-code” video analytics builder offered a flexible set of building blocks for Crowd Counting that uses such advanced AI analytics as head detection, occupancy monitor, and line crossing to keep an accurate count of people in a defined area. Lumeo’s Crowd Detection enabled Unified Command to layer in analytics with the flexibility to monitor multiple video streams at exit points to count the number of unique individuals who exited the defined event footprint. Then, the count of those leaving was subtracted from the count of those already inside the venue to return an accurate aggregate of the number of people inside the footprint. The company running the metal detectors produced a shared, live spreadsheet that listed entrance and exit numbers updated every fifteen minutes. Using Lumeo’s built-in integration with Google Sheets and Elasticsearch, Unified was able to easily aggregate and extract count information to build real-time dashboards used for event management and post-event statistical reporting.

Chris Gandy, CTO at Unified Command, noted “We were impressed with how quickly and easily Unified was able to set-up the Crowd Counting analytic to test in the cloud and then deploy on-site. Large scale crowd counting has always been a challenge given the multitude of cameras distributed across various exits, differing vantage points, and a high density of people.  With over hundreds of thousands of people attending the event, Lumeo enabled us to deliver extremely accurate, real-time counts with a high degree of accuracy. Plus, it made our job much easier since the integration of the Lumeo Platform with the cameras and the Milestone video management system was seamless.”

The City of Las Vegas is used to dealing with crowds; thousands of people fly in and out every day. But with the decreasing COVID restrictions and the re-introduction of major events, the crowds have never been bigger. So, when one of the largest organizations in the country held one of their major yearly events, the league and the city passed the ball to two security industry innovators to maintain not only safety but to ensure the number of people in each venue did not exceed capacity limits. The power of Lumeo analytics coupled with the event management know-how of Unified Command produced real-time, accurate counts to keep attendees safe and city agencies at ease. You could say the solution was a home run, or better yet, a touchdown!