The invention provides a video analysis based
pedestrian volume counting method. The videos comprise at least one group of
pedestrian monitoring sample videos and one group of
pedestrian monitoring detection videos shot by a camera from a top region. The pedestrian volume counting method comprises the steps of S10, acquiring
human head images in each pedestrian monitoring sample video and each pedestrian monitoring detection video, and forming a
positive sample training image set and a
negative sample training image set; S20, respectively extracting an HOG (
Histogram of Oriented Gradient); S30, performing offline training of an SVM (
Support Vector Machine) head classifier on HOG features of training input images; S40, performing real-time head detection; S50, carrying out target tracking by adopting an
optical flow method; S60, setting an ROI (
Region of Interest); and S70, counting the number of pedestrians. According to the method provided by the invention, the pedestrian volume in a specific region can be counted, pictures at different moments can be checked at a
mobile phone terminal, and a problem of mutual shielding of detected targets can be avoided compared with a method of
human body detection; and the method is established on the basis of widely applied
video monitoring equipment, low in cost and high in counting accuracy.