Seatify: A Real-Time Restaurant/Cafe Occupancy Monitoring System Using CCTV Feed

Restaurants and cafes often face customer dissatisfaction due to the lack of real-time seat availability information, especially during peak hours or group visits. This study presents Seatify, a real-time cafe and restaurant occupancy monitoring system that uses existing CCTV footage and computer vision techniques to detect seat availability without additional sensors. Seatify detects occupied and available seats real-time, identifies and maps the dynamic seating layouts and then display the most up-to-date visual seating layout to customers in real-time via a web page. Additionally, hourly and weekly demand forecasting analytics are provided to cafe owners. Custom trained YOLOv8x object detection model and ByteTrack were used to track people, chairs and tables. Identifying pose of detected persons is done using YOLOv8x pose estimation model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach offers accurate seat detection, adapts to dynamic layouts, and provides a cost-effective alternative to hardware-based systems. Finally, Seatify is a comprehensive, AI-powered seating management system that enhances customer experience and optimizes seating efficiency.