STNet: Scale Tree Network With Multi-Level Auxiliator for Crowd Counting

Abstract

State-of-the-art approaches for crowd counting resort to deep neural networks to predict density maps. However, counting people in congested scenes remains a challenging task because counting accuracy can be seriously degraded by the presence of drastic scale variation, density inconsistency, and complex background. To battle this ingrained issue, we propose in this paper a novel and powerful network called Scale Tree Network (STNet) for accurate crowd counting. STNet consists of two key components: a Scale-Tree Diversity Enhancer and a Multi-level Auxiliator. Specifically, the Diversity Enhancer is designed to enrich scale diversity, which alleviates limitations of existing methods caused by insufficient level of scales. A novel tree structure is adopted to hierarchically parse coarse-to-fine crowd regions. Furthermore, a simple yet effective Multi-level Auxiliator is presented to aid in exploiting generalisable shared characteristics at multiple levels, allowing more accurate pixel-wise background cognition. The overall STNet is trained in an end-to-end manner, without the needs for manually tuning loss weights between the main and the auxiliary tasks. Extensive experiments on five challenging crowd datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.