1. A computer-implemented image based method of determining and communicating a busyness metric associated with a number of people within an area captured by one or more image capturing devices, the method comprising: a) acquiring one or more images of the area from the one or more image capturing devices; b) calculating a representation of the number of people within the area from the acquired one or more images of the area, the representation of the number of people calculated using a regression model trained with a training set of images, the regression model configured to receive an input feature vector associated with an acquired image and output a number of distinct people associated with the input feature vector associated with the acquired image; c) calculating the busyness metric as a function of the representation of the number of people within the area, the busyness metric related to the calculated representation of people within the area during a sequence of acquired images representative of a predetermined time period; and d) communicating the busyness metric to one or more of an electronic device associated with a user, a data storage device and a post processing device, wherein step b) includes: b1) dividing each of the one or more acquired images into a plurality of windows; b2) extracting feature vectors from each of the plurality of windows; b3) concatenating the extracted feature vectors to form a single feature vector representation of the number of people within the area covered by the plurality of windows; and b4) inputting the single feature vector to the regression model to determine the number of people within the area covered by the plurality of windows.