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; c) calculating the busyness metric as a function of the representation of the number of people within the area; 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.