UCF Researchers Perform World's First Automated Mass-Crowd Count

That's funny because i'm catalan and there was a war of numbers between the organization and the Spanish government, typical discussion as always in this type of demonstrations. This article could end in the front page of some newspapers.

Given the use of statistics this seems more like an estimate than a count per se. Mind you it's a bit thin on the details.

Agreed. It should be a lot more accurate than the estimates we currently use though, where there's often a factor of 10 difference in the number reported depending on the source (protesters vs police/government officials, for example).

I've been part of protests that clearly had at least in the low thousands of participants, that were reported in the media as "a couple hundred people according to police". It'd be nice to have a more objective measure.

What are some real world use cases for this?