Crowd counting using deep learning based head detection

Abstract

Scale invariance and high miss detection rates for small objects are some of the challenging issues for object detection and often lead to inaccurate results. This research aims to provide an accurate detection model for crowd counting by focusing on human head detection from natural scenes acquired from publicly available datasets of Casablanca, Hollywood-Heads and Scut-head. In this study, we tuned a yolov5, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based object detection architecture, and then evaluated the model using mean average precision (mAP) score, precision, and recall. The transfer learning approach is used for fine-tuning the architecture. Training on one dataset and testing the model on another leads to inaccurate results due to different types of heads in different datasets. Another main contribution of our research is combining the three datasets into a single dataset, including every kind of head that is medium, large and small. From the experimental results, it can be seen that this yolov5 architecture showed significant improvements in small head detections in crowded scenes as compared to the other baseline approaches, such as the Faster R-CNN and VGG-16-based SSD MultiBox Detector.