A Deep-Fusion Network for Crowd Counting in High-Density Crowded Scenes

Abstract

People counting has been investigated extensively as a tool to increase the individual’s safety and to avoid crowd hazards at public places. It is a challenging task especially in high-density environment such as Hajj and Umrah, where millions of people gathered in a constrained environment to perform rituals. This is due to large variations of scales of people across different scenes. To solve scale problem, a simple and effective solution is to use an image pyramid. However, heavy computational cost is required to process multiple levels of the pyramid. To overcome this issue, we propose deep-fusion model that efficiently and effectively leverages the hierarchical features exits in various convolutional layers deep neural network. Specifically, we propose a network that combine multiscale features from shallow to deep layers of the network and map the input image to a density map. The summation of peaks in the density map provides the final crowd count. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed deep network, we perform experiments on three different benchmark datasets, namely, UCF_CC_50, ShanghaiTech, and UCF-QNRF. From experiments results, we show that the proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by achieving low Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Square Error (MSE) values.