Crowd density estimation via a multichannel dense grouping network

Abstract

Deep learning has made substantial progress in crowd density estimation, but in practical application, due to the interference factors such as uneven distribution of crowd and changes in illumination, the existing methods still have large errors in counting. To solve the above problems, a crowd density estimation method based on multichannel dense grouping network is proposed. To solve the problem that it is difficult to extract the multiscale information of the crowd due to the uneven distribution of the crowd, multichannel dense grouping module (McDGM) is designed. In the module, Improved grouping convolution block (IGCB) is dense connected with other layers to obtain different levels of crowd characteristics, so as to avoid the loss of multi-scale information. In addition, the parameters of IGCB are reduced by group convolution. Then, to overcome the change of illumination, a crowd image enhancement algorithm is designed, which makes the image clear by the average pixel value and adjusting the contrast. Finally, to enhance the sensitivity of the network to crowd counting, a new loss function is proposed, which adds counting loss to the previous pixel space loss to improve the accuracy of crowd counting. The algorithm in this paper has been tested on ShanghaiTech and UCF_CC_50 datasets. The test results show that the algorithm in this paper has better statistical accuracy.