Abstract: An apparatus for detecting people waiting for an elevator. A detecting unit detects the number of people waiting on the basis of an image from an image pickup unit and delivers that number to a corresponding second people waiting detecting unit. The apparatus includes a unit which generates a coefficient depending on a percentage of overlap of the field of view of a reference image pickup unit, which is one of several image pickup units, with the field of view of a different image pickup unit on the basis of data on the allocation of an elevator, and calculates the number of waiting people in the overall hall from the respective numbers of waiting people output from the plurality of image pickup units and those coefficients. The coefficient generating unit generates a maximum coefficient for the reference image pickup unit and a smaller coefficient for any remaining image pickup unit based on the of overlap of the field of view of the respective image pickup units.

Abstract: An image of an elevator hall or an inside of elevator car is acquired by photographing apparatus, and the number of waiting passenger is detected by comparing the above-mentioned image with a background image when no passenger is present at the elevator hall. Second image processing apparatus with high precision is prepared by the same image information as that of first image processing apparatus, teacher information derived therefrom is compared with an output from the first image processing apparatus. If the teacher information is not coincident with the output from the first image processing means, parameters required for performing the image process by the first image processing appartus, for instance, constants, threshold values and weight coefficients employed in an image processing algorithm are adjusted.