Instant Crowd Counts for Anyone Who Manages a Space
Tapp's crowd-monitoring technology, already trusted by the City of Amsterdam, is now available as a free, no-installation web tool :
"How many people are actually in there?" is a question property owners, city officials and event managers ask constantly, and usually answer with a guess. Fire codes, insurance policies and event permits all hinge on an accurate headcount, yet most venues still rely on door clickers, radio check-ins, or someone eyeballing a crowd from a balcony.
PublicEye removes the guesswork. Upload a single photo of a crowd, whether it's a lobby, a square, or a festival field, and the tool returns an instant headcount alongside a visual density map showing exactly where people are clustered. There's nothing to install and no camera hardware to wire in: it runs in a browser, on a laptop or a phone, and returns a result in seconds.
Built on a system Amsterdam already trusts
PublicEye isn't a new, unproven idea. It's the public face of the same crowd-counting technology Tapp and Life Electronic built for the City of Amsterdam's CTO office, first deployed in 2020 to monitor crowding at Dam Square, Vondelpark, the Marineterrein Living Lab and the Johan Cruijff ArenA. In a head-to-head benchmark against a commercial crowd-counting vendor on Dam Square, the system reached 95.8% accuracy, missing by only 1 to 2 people in a crowd of roughly 100. It now underpins Amsterdam's own public Druktebeeld busyness dashboard and is listed in the city's official Algorithm Register.
The version now live at publiceye.tapp.nl runs on ViCCT, a transformer-based computer vision model purpose-built for crowd counting, so the same accuracy that convinced a municipality to trust it is one photo upload away for anyone else who needs it.
For property owners
Whether it's a lobby event, a rooftop gathering or a retail atrium during a sale, occupancy limits aren't optional. They're what your fire code, your insurer and your tenants expect you to enforce. PublicEye gives building and facility managers a fast, defensible way to check a space against capacity limits without installing fixed sensors in every room, turning a compliance question into a thirty-second photo upload.
For city officials
Over-tourism, demonstrations, festivals and public health guidance all depend on knowing how crowded a public space really is, in real time. PublicEye was built for exactly this: it was designed from the ground up under the TADA privacy manifesto, meaning it counts people anonymously and never stores or identifies a single face. For municipalities already wary of black-box vendor contracts, that's a system built the way Amsterdam already vetted and approved it: open, auditable, and privacy-by-design.
For event managers
Media reporting on attendance, sponsor guarantees, and above all, safety at the gate, all come down to a number you can trust. Rather than paying for a fixed-install door-counting system for a single event, event teams can point a phone at the crowd and get an instant, evidence-based count, repeatable at multiple entrances or checkpoints throughout the day.
Try it now
PublicEye is live at publiceye.tapp.nl: no signup, no installation, just upload a photo and get a count and density map back immediately. For organizations that want to go further, whether that's live camera feeds, real-time dashboards, or API access feeding an existing security or operations system, that's the same technology Tapp already built for Amsterdam, and we'd welcome the conversation about bringing it to your site.