Recently, crowd counting is a hot topic in crowd analysis. Many CNN-based counting algorithms attain good performance. However, these methods only focus on the local appearance features of crowd scenes but ignore the large-range pixel-wise contextual and crowd attention information. To remedy the above problems, in this paper, we introduce the Spatial-/Channel-wise Attention Models into the traditional Regression CNN to estimate the density map, which is named as "SCAR". It consists of two modules, namely Spatial-wise Attention Model (SAM) and Channel-wise Attention Model (CAM). The former can encode the pixel-wise context of the entire image to more accurately predict density maps at the pixel level. The latter attempts to extract more discriminative features among different channels, which aids model to pay attention to the head region, the core of crowd scenes. Intuitively, CAM alleviates the mistaken estimation for background regions. Finally, two types of attention information and traditional CNN's feature maps are integrated by a concatenation operation. Furthermore, the extensive experiments are conducted on four popular datasets, Shanghai Tech Part A/B, GCC, and UCF_CC_50 Dataset. The results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results.
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Crowd counting problem that counts the number of people in an image has been extensively studied in recent years. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of crowd counting problem, namely "Categorized Crowd Counting", that counts the number of people sitting and standing in a given image. Categorized crowd counting has many real-world applications such as crowd monitoring, customer service, and resource management. The major challenges in categorized crowd counting come from high occlusion, perspective distortion and the seemingly identical upper body posture of sitting and standing persons.…
Aimetis Corp.（艾梅蒂斯公司）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
The problem of automated crowd segmentation and counting has garnered significant interest in the field of video surveillance. This paper proposes a novel scene invariant crowd segmentation and counting algorithm designed with high accuracy yet low computational complexity in mind, which is key for widespread industrial adoption. A novel low-complexity, scale-normalized feature called Histogram of Moving Gradients (HoMG) is introduced for highly effective spatiotemporal representation of individuals and crowds within a video. Real-time crowd segmentation is achieved via boosted cascade of weak…
Compared with single image based crowd counting, video provides the spatial-temporal information of the crowd that would help improve the robustness of crowd counting. But translation, rotation and scaling of people lead to the change of density map of heads between neighbouring frames. Meanwhile, people walking in/out or being occluded in dynamic scenes leads to the change of head counts. To alleviate these issues in video crowd counting, a Locality-constrained Spatial Transformer Network (LSTN) is proposed. Specifically, we first leverage a Convolutional Neural Networks to estimate the densi…
This paper proposes a crowd counting method. Crowd counting is difficult because of large appearance changes of a target which caused by density and scale changes. Conventional crowd counting methods generally utilize one predictor (e,g., regression and multi-class classifier). However, such only one predictor can not count targets with large appearance changes well. In this paper, we propose to predict the number of targets using multiple CNNs specialized to a specific appearance, and those CNNs are adaptively selected according to the appearance of a test image. By integrating the selected C…
Fully-supervised crowd counting is a laborious task due to the large amounts of annotations. Few works focus on weekly-supervised crowd counting, where only the global crowd numbers are available for training. The main challenge of weekly-supervised crowd counting is the lack of local supervision information. To address this problem, we propose a self-adaptive feature similarity learning (SFSL) network and a global-local consistency (GLC) loss to reinforce local feature representation. We introduce a feature vector which represents the unbiased feature estimation of persons. The network update…
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Visual crowd counting has been recently studied as a way to enable people counting in crowd scenes from images. Albeit successful, vision-based crowd counting approaches could fail to capture informative features in extreme conditions, e.g., imaging at night and occlusion. In this work, we introduce a novel task of audiovisual crowd counting, in which visual and auditory information are integrated for counting purposes. We collect a large-scale benchmark, named auDiovISual Crowd cOunting (DISCO) dataset, consisting of 1,935 images and the corresponding audio clips, and 170,270 annotated instan…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
State-of-the-art methods for counting people in crowded scenes rely on deep networks to estimate crowd density. While effective, deep learning approaches are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which, in a crowd-counting context, can lead to serious security issues. However, attack and defense mechanisms have been virtually unexplored in regression tasks, let alone for crowd density estimation. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of existing attack strategies on crowd-counting networks, and introduce a simple yet effective pixel-wise detection mechanism. It builds on the intuition t…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；MICC, University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学MICC）
We propose a novel crowd counting approach that leverages abundantly available unlabeled crowd imagery in a learning-to-rank framework. To induce a ranking of cropped images , we use the observation that any sub-image of a crowded scene image is guaranteed to contain the same number or fewer persons than the super-image. This allows us to address the problem of limited size of existing datasets for crowd counting. We collect two crowd scene datasets from Google using keyword searches and query-by-example image retrieval, respectively. We demonstrate how to efficiently learn from these unlabele…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（数据洞察中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
In this paper we propose ResnetCrowd, a deep residual architecture for simultaneous crowd counting, violent behaviour detection and crowd density level classification. To train and evaluate the proposed multi-objective technique, a new 100 image dataset referred to as Multi Task Crowd is constructed. This new dataset is the first computer vision dataset fully annotated for crowd counting, violent behaviour detection and density level classification. Our experiments show that a multi-task approach boosts individual task performance for all tasks and most notably for violent behaviour detection …
The mainstream crowd counting methods regress density map and integrate it to obtain counting results. Since the density representation to one head accords to its adjacent distribution, it embeds the same category objects with variant values, while human beings counting models the invariant features namely similarity to objects. Inspired by this, we propose a rational and anthropoid crowd counting framework. To begin with, we leverage counting scalar as supervision signal, which provides global and implicit guidance to similar matters. Then, the large kernel CNN is utilized to imitate the para…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, CAS（中国科学院上海高等研究院）；Videt Tech.（Videt科技公司）
Crowd counting, i.e., estimation number of the pedestrian in crowd images, is emerging as an important research problem with the public security applications. A key component for the crowd counting systems is the construction of counting models which are robust to various scenarios under facts such as camera perspective and physical barriers. In this paper, we present an adaptive scenario discovery framework for crowd counting. The system is structured with two parallel pathways that are trained with different sizes of the receptive field to represent different scales and crowd densities. Afte…
Fine-grained Domain Adaptive Crowd Counting via Point-derived Segmentation
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Jilian Technology Group (Video++)（极链科技集团（Video++））；Videt Tech Ltd.（维视科技有限公司）
Crowd counting aims to count the number of instantaneous people in a crowded space, and many promising solutions have been proposed for single image crowd counting. With the ubiquitous video capture devices in public safety field, how to effectively apply the crowd counting technique to video content has become an urgent problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework based on temporal aware modeling of the relationship between video frames. The proposed network contains a few dilated residual blocks, and each of them consists of the layers that compute the temporal convolutions of feat…
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective crowd counting and localization network named SCALNet. Unlike most existing works that separate the counting and localization tasks, we consider those tasks as a pixel-wise dense prediction problem and integrate them into an end-to-end framework. Specifically, for crowd counting, we adopt a counting head supervised by the Mean Square Error (MSE) loss. For crowd localization, the key insight is to recognize the keypoint of people, i.e., the center point of heads. We propose a localization head to distinguish dense crowds trained by two loss funct…
In this paper, we describe our study on how humans allocate their attention during visual crowd counting. Using an eye tracker, we collect gaze behavior of human participants who are tasked with counting the number of people in crowd images. Analyzing the collected gaze behavior of ten human participants on thirty crowd images, we observe some common approaches for visual counting. For an image of a small crowd, the approach is to enumerate over all people or groups of people in the crowd, and this explains the high level of similarity between the fixation density maps of different human parti…
In this paper, we consider the problem of crowd counting in images. Given an image of a crowded scene, our goal is to estimate the density map of this image, where each pixel value in the density map corresponds to the crowd density at the corresponding location in the image. Given the estimated density map, the final crowd count can be obtained by summing over all values in the density map. One challenge of crowd counting is the scale variation in images. In this work, we propose a novel scale-aware attention network to address this challenge. Using the attention mechanism popular in recent d…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Accurately estimating the number of objects in a single image is a challenging yet meaningful task and has been applied in many applications such as urban planning and public safety. In the various object counting tasks, crowd counting is particularly prominent due to its specific significance to social security and development. Fortunately, the development of the techniques for crowd counting can be generalized to other related fields such as vehicle counting and environment survey, if without taking their characteristics into account. Therefore, many researchers are devoting to crowd countin…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
The problem of counting crowds in varying density scenes or in different density regions of the same scene, named as pan-density crowd counting, is highly challenging. Previous methods are designed for single density scenes or do not fully utilize pan-density information. We propose a novel framework, the Pan-Density Network (PaDNet), for pan-density crowd counting. In order to effectively capture pan-density information, PaDNet has a novel module, the Density-Aware Network (DAN), that contains multiple sub-networks pretrained on scenarios with different densities. Further, a module named the …
University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Huawei Technologies Canada（华为加拿大公司）
We address the problem of image-based crowd counting. In particular, we propose a new problem called unlabeled scene-adaptive crowd counting. Given a new target scene, we would like to have a crowd counting model specifically adapted to this particular scene based on the target data that capture some information about the new scene. In this paper, we propose to use one or more unlabeled images from the target scene to perform the adaptation. In comparison with the existing problem setups (e.g. fully supervised), our proposed problem setup is closer to the real-world applications of crowd count…
JPEG image compression algorithm is a widely used technique for image size reduction in edge and cloud computing settings. However, applying such lossy compression on images processed by deep neural networks can lead to significant accuracy degradation. Inspired by the curriculum learning paradigm, we propose a training approach called curriculum pre-training (CPT) for crowd counting on compressed images, which alleviates the drop in accuracy resulting from lossy compression. We verify the effectiveness of our approach by extensive experiments on three crowd counting datasets, two crowd counti…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Crowd counting is a challenging task due to the issues such as scale variation and perspective variation in real crowd scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel Cascaded Residual Density Network (CRDNet) in a coarse-to-fine approach to generate the high-quality density map for crowd counting more accurately. (1) We estimate the residual density maps by multi-scale pyramidal features through cascaded residual density modules. It can improve the quality of density map layer by layer effectively. (2) A novel additional local count loss is presented to refine the accuracy of crowd counting, which …
Crowd counting in single-view images has achieved outstanding performance on existing counting datasets. However, single-view counting is not applicable to large and wide scenes (e.g., public parks, long subway platforms, or event spaces) because a single camera cannot capture the whole scene in adequate detail for counting, e.g., when the scene is too large to fit into the field-of-view of the camera, too long so that the resolution is too low on faraway crowds, or when there are too many large objects that occlude large portions of the crowd. Therefore, to solve the wide-area counting task r…
In this paper, we address the challenging problem of crowd counting in congested scenes. Specifically, we present Inverse Attention Guided Deep Crowd Counting Network (IA-DCCN) that efficiently infuses segmentation information through an inverse attention mechanism into the counting network, resulting in significant improvements. The proposed method, which is based on VGG-16, is a single-step training framework and is simple to implement. The use of segmentation information results in minimal computational overhead and does not require any additional annotations. We demonstrate the significanc…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
Crowd counting, for estimating the number of people in a crowd using vision-based computer techniques, has attracted much interest in the research community. Although many attempts have been reported, real-world problems, such as huge variation in subjects' sizes in images and serious occlusion among people, make it still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Counting Convolutional Neural Network (A-CCNN) and consider the scale variation of objects in a frame adaptively so as to improve the accuracy of counting. Our method takes advantages of contextual information to pr…
The crowd counting task aims at estimating the number of people located in an image or a frame from videos. Existing methods widely adopt density maps as the training targets to optimize the point-to-point loss. While in testing phase, we only focus on the differences between the crowd numbers and the global summation of density maps, which indicate the inconsistency between the training targets and the evaluation criteria. To solve this problem, we introduce a new target, named local counting map (LCM), to obtain more accurate results than density map based approaches. Moreover, we also propo…
Peking University（北京大学）；China University of Petroleum (Beijing)（中国石油大学（北京））
In this article, we propose a simulated crowd counting dataset CrowdX, which has a large scale, accurate labeling, parameterized realization, and high fidelity. The experimental results of using this dataset as data enhancement show that the performance of the proposed streamlined and efficient benchmark network ESA-Net can be improved by 8.4\%. The other two classic heterogeneous architectures MCNN and CSRNet pre-trained on CrowdX also show significant performance improvements. Considering many influencing factors determine performance, such as background, camera angle, human density, and res…
Traditional crowd counting approaches usually use Gaussian assumption to generate pseudo density ground truth, which suffers from problems like inaccurate estimation of the Gaussian kernel sizes. In this paper, we propose a new measure-based counting approach to regress the predicted density maps to the scattered point-annotated ground truth directly. First, crowd counting is formulated as a measure matching problem. Second, we derive a semi-balanced form of Sinkhorn divergence, based on which a Sinkhorn counting loss is designed for measure matching. Third, we propose a self-supervised mechan…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
In real-world crowd counting applications, the crowd densities vary greatly in spatial and temporal domains. A detection based counting method will estimate crowds accurately in low density scenes, while its reliability in congested areas is downgraded. A regression based approach, on the other hand, captures the general density information in crowded regions. Without knowing the location of each person, it tends to overestimate the count in low density areas. Thus, exclusively using either one of them is not sufficient to handle all kinds of scenes with varying densities. To address this issu…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）
Crowd counting is an important task that shown great application value in public safety-related fields, which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In the current research, the accuracy of counting numbers and crowd density estimation are the main concerns. Although the emergence of deep learning has greatly promoted the development of this field, crowd counting under cluttered background is still a serious challenge. In order to solve this problem, we propose a ScaleAware Crowd Counting Network (SACCN) with regional and semantic attentions. The proposed SACCN distinguishes crowd…
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
In this paper, we tackle the problem of Crowd Counting, and present a crowd density estimation based approach for obtaining the crowd count. Most of the existing crowd counting approaches rely on local features for estimating the crowd density map. In this work, we investigate the usefulness of combining local with non-local features for crowd counting. We use convolution layers for extracting local features, and a type of self-attention mechanism for extracting non-local features. We combine the local and the non-local features, and use it for estimating crowd density map. We conduct experime…
Due to its variety of applications in the real-world, the task of single image-based crowd counting has received a lot of interest in the recent years. Recently, several approaches have been proposed to address various problems encountered in crowd counting. These approaches are essentially based on convolutional neural networks that require large amounts of data to train the network parameters. Considering this, we introduce a new large scale unconstrained crowd counting dataset (JHU-CROWD++) that contains "4,372" images with "1.51 million" annotations. In comparison to existing datasets, the…
Video Analytics Lab（视频分析实验室）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学研究院）
Our work proposes a novel deep learning framework for estimating crowd density from static images of highly dense crowds. We use a combination of deep and shallow, fully convolutional networks to predict the density map for a given crowd image. Such a combination is used for effectively capturing both the high-level semantic information (face/body detectors) and the low-level features (blob detectors), that are necessary for crowd counting under large scale variations. As most crowd datasets have limited training samples (<100 images) and deep learning based approaches require large amounts of…
Domain shift across crowd data severely hinders crowd counting models to generalize to unseen scenarios. Although domain adaptive crowd counting approaches close this gap to a certain extent, they are still dependent on the target domain data to adapt (e.g. finetune) their models to the specific domain. In this paper, we aim to train a model based on a single source domain which can generalize well on any unseen domain. This falls into the realm of domain generalization that remains unexplored in crowd counting. We first introduce a dynamic sub-domain division scheme which divides the source d…
Crowd counting on static images is a challenging problem due to scale variations. Recently deep neural networks have been shown to be effective in this task. However, existing neural-networks-based methods often use the multi-column or multi-network model to extract the scale-relevant features, which is more complicated for optimization and computation wasting. To this end, we propose a novel multi-scale convolutional neural network (MSCNN) for single image crowd counting. Based on the multi-scale blobs, the network is able to generate scale-relevant features for higher crowd counting performa…
In recent years, with the progress of deep learning technologies, crowd counting has been rapidly developed. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective crowd counting framework that is able to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on various crowded scenes. In particular, we first introduce a perspective-aware density map generation method that is able to produce ground-truth density maps from point annotations to train crowd counting model to accomplish superior performance than prior density map generation techniques. Besides, leveraging our density map generation method, we propose …
In this work, we tackle the problem of crowd counting in images. We present a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based density estimation approach to solve this problem. Predicting a high resolution density map in one go is a challenging task. Hence, we present a two branch CNN architecture for generating high resolution density maps, where the first branch generates a low resolution density map, and the second branch incorporates the low resolution prediction and feature maps from the first branch to generate a high resolution density map. We also propose a multi-stage extension of our approa…
State-of-the-art multi-object tracking~(MOT) methods follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, where object trajectories are obtained by associating per-frame outputs of object detectors. In crowded scenes, however, detectors often fail to obtain accurate detections due to heavy occlusions and high crowd density. In this paper, we propose a new MOT paradigm, tracking-by-counting, tailored for crowded scenes. Using crowd density maps, we jointly model detection, counting, and tracking of multiple targets as a network flow program, which simultaneously finds the global optimal detections and tr…
In recent years, significant progress has been made on the research of crowd counting. However, as the challenging scale variations and complex scenes existed in crowds, neither traditional convolution networks nor recent Transformer architectures with fixed-size attention could handle the task well. To address this problem, this paper proposes a scene-adaptive attention network, termed SAANet. First of all, we design a deformable attention in-built Transformer backbone, which learns adaptive feature representations with deformable sampling locations and dynamic attention weights. Then we prop…
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；Institute of Smart City, Shanghai University（上海大学智慧城市研究院）
In this paper, we propose a method called Convolutional Neural Network-Markov Random Field (CNN-MRF) to estimate the crowd count in a still image. We first divide the dense crowd visible image into overlapping patches and then use a deep convolutional neural network to extract features from each patch image, followed by a fully connected neural network to regress the local patch crowd count. Since the local patches have overlapping portions, the crowd count of the adjacent patches has a high correlation. We use this correlation and the Markov random field to smooth the counting results of the …
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）
This technical report attempts to provide efficient and solid kits addressed on the field of crowd counting, which is denoted as Crowd Counting Code Framework (C$^3$F). The contributions of C$^3$F are in three folds: 1) Some solid baseline networks are presented, which have achieved the state-of-the-arts. 2) Some flexible parameter setting strategies are provided to further promote the performance. 3) A powerful log system is developed to record the experiment process, which can enhance the reproducibility of each experiment. Our code is made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/gjy30…
Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海高等研究院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Crowd counting is one of the core tasks in various surveillance applications. A practical system involves estimating accurate head counts in dynamic scenarios under different lightning, camera perspective and occlusion states. Previous approaches estimate head counts despite that they can vary dramatically in different density settings; the crowd is often unevenly distributed and the results are therefore unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a lightweight deep learning framework that can automatically estimate the crowd density level and adaptively choose between different counter network…
In this paper, we explore a strong baseline for crowd counting and an unsupervised people localization algorithm based on estimated density maps. Firstly, existing methods achieve state-of-the-art performance based on different backbones and kinds of training tricks. We collect different backbones and training tricks and evaluate the impact of changing them and develop an efficient pipeline for crowd counting, which decreases MAE and RMSE significantly on multiple datasets. We also propose a clustering algorithm named isolated KMeans to locate the heads in density maps. This method can divide …
In the last decade, crowd counting and localization attract much attention of researchers due to its wide-spread applications, including crowd monitoring, public safety, space design, etc. Many Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are designed for tackling this task. However, currently released datasets are so small-scale that they can not meet the needs of the supervised CNN-based algorithms. To remedy this problem, we construct a large-scale congested crowd counting and localization dataset, NWPU-Crowd, consisting of 5,109 images, in a total of 2,133,375 annotated heads with points and boxes.…
Southeast University（东南大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Crowd counting is an important task in computer vision, which has many applications in video surveillance. Although the regression-based framework has achieved great improvements for crowd counting, how to improve the discriminative power of image representation is still an open problem. Conventional holistic features used in crowd counting often fail to capture semantic attributes and spatial cues of the image. In this paper, we propose integrating semantic information into learning locality-aware feature sets for accurate crowd counting. First, with the help of convolutional neural network (…
RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) crowd counting is a challenging task, which uses thermal images as complementary information to RGB images to deal with the decreased performance of unimodal RGB-based methods in scenes with low-illumination or similar backgrounds. Most existing methods propose well-designed structures for cross-modal fusion in RGB-T crowd counting. However, these methods have difficulty in encoding cross-modal contextual semantic information in RGB-T image pairs. Considering the aforementioned problem, we propose a two-stream RGB-T crowd counting network called Multi-Attention Fusion Netwo…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Region of Interest (ROI) crowd counting can be formulated as a regression problem of learning a mapping from an image or a video frame to a crowd density map. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) models have achieved promising results for crowd counting. However, even when dealing with video data, CNN-based methods still consider each video frame independently, ignoring the strong temporal correlation between neighboring frames. To exploit the otherwise very useful temporal information in video sequences, we propose a variant of a recent deep learning model called convolutional LSTM (C…
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；Institute of Smart City, Shanghai University（上海大学智慧城市研究院）；Anyang Institute of Technology（安阳工学院）
Computer vision techniques have been used to produce accurate and generic crowd count estimators in recent years. Due to severe occlusions, appearance variations, perspective distortions and illumination conditions, crowd counting is a very challenging task. To this end, we propose a deep spatial regression model(DSRM) for counting the number of individuals present in a still image with arbitrary perspective and arbitrary resolution. Our proposed model is based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and long short term memory (LSTM). First, we put the images into a pretrained CNN to extract a s…
Background noise and scale variation are common problems that have been long recognized in crowd counting. Humans glance at a crowd image and instantly know the approximate number of human and where they are through attention the crowd regions and the congestion degree of crowd regions with a global receptive field. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel feedback network with Region-Aware block called RANet by modeling humans Top-Down visual perception mechanism. Firstly, we introduce a feedback architecture to generate priority maps that provide prior about candidate crowd regions in input …
Occlusions, complex backgrounds, scale variations and non-uniform distributions present great challenges for crowd counting in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method using an attention model to exploit head locations which are the most important cue for crowd counting. The attention model estimates a probability map in which high probabilities indicate locations where heads are likely to be present. The estimated probability map is used to suppress non-head regions in feature maps from several multi-scale feature extraction branches of a convolution neural network for…
In this work, we explore the cross-scale similarity in crowd counting scenario, in which the regions of different scales often exhibit high visual similarity. This feature is universal both within an image and across different images, indicating the importance of scale invariance of a crowd counting model. Motivated by this, in this paper we propose simple but effective variants of pooling module, i.e., multi-kernel pooling and stacked pooling, to boost the scale invariance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), benefiting much the crowd density estimation and counting. Specifically, the mul…
Most recent methods used for crowd counting are based on the convolutional neural network (CNN), which has a strong ability to extract local features. But CNN inherently fails in modeling the global context due to the limited receptive fields. However, the transformer can model the global context easily. In this paper, we propose a simple approach called CCTrans to simplify the design pipeline. Specifically, we utilize a pyramid vision transformer backbone to capture the global crowd information, a pyramid feature aggregation (PFA) model to combine low-level and high-level features, an efficie…
Every crowd counting researcher has likely observed their model output wrong positive predictions on image regions not containing any person. But how often do these mistakes happen? Are our models negatively affected by this? In this paper we analyze this problem in depth. In order to understand its magnitude, we present an extensive analysis on five of the most important crowd counting datasets. We present this analysis in two parts. First, we quantify the number of mistakes made by popular crowd counting approaches. Our results show that (i) mistakes on background are substantial and they ar…
