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Ask HN: Counting # of protestors?

6 points by mtgentry ↗ HN
I was at the anti-trump rally in Los Angeles today. The LAPD estimated the crowd size to be 8,000 however that number seemed very low to me. I'm wondering if anyone has some software than can look at footage to estimate crowd size. There are a few shots that capture the majority of the protest today like this: https://instagram.com/p/BMuxQDcjdI4/

Would love to have a hard count of how many ppl were there - not an estimation!

6 comments

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tmaly
that's an extremely hard problem to solve.

I think doing an order of magnitude estimation would be your best bet.

matt4077
I remember stories about this from the Obama inauguration. IIRC, someone (google?) used areal shots, divide it into segments, assign those segments to different densities, and count the people in samples from all densities.
tictaktoe
lets just say there must not be enough to win Hillary the presidency!
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martin_a
You can post the image to an imageboard of your choice and write that those are 8.000 people. Somebody won't trust you and count it.