Deep Crowd Counting In Congested Scenes Through Refine Modules

Abstract

Crowd counting, which aims to predict the number of persons in a highly congested scene, has been widely explored and can be used in many applications like video surveillance, pedestrian flow, etc. The severe mutual occlusion among person, the large perspective distortion and the scale variations always hinder an accurate estimation. Although existing approaches have made much progress, there still has room for improvement. The drawbacks of existing methods are 2-fold: (1)the scale information, which is an important factor for crowd counting, is always insufficiently explored and thus cannot bring well-estimated results; (2)using a unified framework for the whole image may result to a rough estimation in subregions, and thus leads to inaccurate estimation. Motivated by this, we propose a new method to address these problems. We first construct a crowd-specific and scale-aware convolutional neural network, which considers crowd scale variations and integrates multi-scale feature representations in the Cross Scale Module (CSM), to produce the initial predicted density map. Then the proposed Local Refine Modules (LRMs) are performed to gradually re-estimate predictions of subregions. We conduct experiments on three crowd counting datasets (the ShanghaiTech dataset, the UCF_CC_50 dataset and the UCSD dataset). Experiments show that our proposed method achieves superior performance compared with the state-of-the-arts. Besides, we conduct experiments on counting vehicles in the TRANCOS dataset and get better results, which proves the generalization ability of the proposed method.