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Originally Posted by Calgaryborn
If you go to AirPhotosLive.com you can see how much experience they have at guessing the population of a crowd: Zero. They take photos from unmanned balloons for a living.
Their estimate would be even less accurate than other news agencies who relied on the experience of reporters who were present at rallies when the park service did provide a population estimates.
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How AirPhotosLive counts a crowd:
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To get the numbers for an event, the company uses a 360-degree, spherical panoramic camera that can capture shots of the crowd from every direction all at once during the "peak" time of an event, or when attendance is at its highest, according to Curt Westergard, president of AirPhotosLive.com.
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A series of 3-D grids can be super-imposed over the images, breaking up the massive, complex crowd images into an easier-to-manage system.
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Samples of sections of the grids (which can include 100-by-100 feet or 500-by-500 feet squares) are then tallied by counting every person in them. These headcounts are then plugged into a mathematical formula (based on known, spatial distributions of crowds) that calculates how many similar grid sections there are based on the density of people in each section, according to Westergard.
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They also counted the Obama inauguration crowd.