Iterative Crowd Counting

Our work proposes a novel deep learning framework for estimating crowd density from static images of highly dense crowds. We use a combination of deep and shallow, fully convolutional networks to predict the density map for a given crowd image. Such a combination is used for effectively capturing both the high-level semantic information (face/body detectors) and the low-level features (blob detectors), that are necessary for crowd counting under large scale variations. As most crowd datasets have limited training samples (<100 images) and deep learning based approaches require large amounts of training data, we perform multiscale data augmentation. Augmenting the training samples in such a manner helps in guiding the CNN to learn scale invariant representations. Our method is tested on the challenging UCF CC 50 dataset, and shown to outperform the state of the art methods.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 2021

Automatically estimating the number of people in unconstrained scenes is a crucial yet challenging task in different real-world applications, including video surveillance, public safety, urban planning, and traffic monitoring. In addition, methods developed to estimate the number of people can be adapted and applied to related tasks in various fields, such as plant counting, vehicle counting, and cell microscopy. Many challenges and problems face crowd counting, including cluttered scenes, extreme occlusions, scale variation, and changes in camera perspective. Therefore, in the past few years, tremendous research efforts have been devoted to crowd counting, and numerous excellent techniques have been proposed. The significant progress in crowd counting methods in recent years is mostly attributed to advances in deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) as well as to public crowd counting datasets. In this work, we review the papers that have been published in the last decade and provi...

Journal of Intelligent Systems, 2020

The purpose of crowd counting is to estimate the number of pedestrians in crowd images. Crowd counting or density estimation is an extremely challenging task in computer vision, due to large scale variations and dense scene. Current methods solve these issues by compounding multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network with different receptive fields. In this paper, a novel end-to-end architecture based on Multi-Scale Adversarial Convolutional Neural Network (MSA-CNN) is proposed to generate crowd density and estimate the amount of crowd. Firstly, a multi-scale network is used to extract the globally relevant features in the crowd image, and then fractionally-strided convolutional layers are designed for up-sampling the output to recover the loss of crucial details caused by the earlier max pooling layers. An adversarial loss is directly employed to shrink the estimated value into the realistic subspace to reduce the blurring effect of density estimation. Joint training is performed in a...

IEEE Access

Nowadays, crowd analysis is one of the most important concepts that needs be relied upon, it contributes to decision making and ensuring the safety and security of the crowd. There are a variety of interesting research problems within the scope of crowd analysis including crowd tracking, crowd behaviour recognition and crowd counting. Crowd counting based on images and videos has been studied in past years. Nonetheless, estimating and detecting the number of human heads remains a challenging task due to occlusions, resolution, and lighting changes. This paper provides an overview and performance comparison of crowd counting techniques using convolutional neural networks (CNN) based on density map estimation. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis and benchmarking of crowd counting based on the UCF-QNRF dataset that contains the largest number of crowd count images and head annotations available in the public domain. We also show the density maps generation and their empirical evaluation along with performance comparison. INDEX TERMS Large-scale crowd, crowd counting, computer vision, deep learning, convolutional neural networks, bio-inspired model, density map estimation.

IEEE Access, 2019

Crowd counting and density estimation is an important and challenging problem in the visual analysis of the crowd. Most of the existing approaches use regression on density maps for the crowd count from a single image. However, these methods cannot localize individual pedestrian and therefore cannot estimate the actual distribution of pedestrians in the environment. On the other hand, detection-based methods detect and localize pedestrians in the scene, but the performance of these methods degrades when applied in high-density situations. To overcome the limitations of pedestrian detectors, we proposed a motion-guided filter (MGF) that exploits spatial and temporal information between consecutive frames of the video to recover missed detections. Our framework is based on the deep convolution neural network (DCNN) for crowd counting in the low-to-medium density videos. We employ various state-of-the-art network architectures, namely, Visual Geometry Group (VGG16), Zeiler and Fergus (ZF), and VGGM in the framework of a region-based DCNN for detecting pedestrians. After pedestrian detection, the proposed motion guided filter is employed. We evaluate the performance of our approach on three publicly available datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly improves the performance of the state-of-the-art detectors. INDEX TERMS Deep convolutional neural networks, crowd counting and density estimation, Motion Guided Filter, faster R-CNN.

2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019

In this work, we propose a novel crowd counting network that progressively generates crowd density maps via residual error estimation. The proposed method uses VGG16 as the backbone network and employs density map generated by the final layer as a coarse prediction to refine and generate finer density maps in a progressive fashion using residual learning. Additionally, the residual learning is guided by an uncertainty-based confidence weighting mechanism that permits the flow of only high-confidence residuals in the refinement path. The proposed Confidence Guided Deep Residual Counting Network (CG-DRCN) is evaluated on recent complex datasets, and it achieves significant improvements in errors. Furthermore, we introduce a new large scale unconstrained crowd counting dataset (JHU-CROWD) that is ∼2.8 × larger than the most recent crowd counting datasets in terms of the number of images. It contains 4,250 images with 1.11 million annotations. In comparison to existing datasets, the proposed dataset is collected under a variety of diverse scenarios and environmental conditions. Specifically, the dataset includes several images with weatherbased degradations and illumination variations in addition to many distractor images, making it a very challenging dataset. Additionally, the dataset consists of rich annotations at both image-level and head-level. Several recent methods are evaluated and compared on this dataset.

arXiv: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2021

Recently the crowd counting has received more and more attention. Especially the technology of high-density environment has become an important research content, and the relevant methods for the existence of extremely dense crowd are not optimal. In this paper, we propose a multi-level attentive Convolutional Neural Network (MLAttnCNN) for crowd counting. We extract high-level contextual information with multiple different scales applied in pooling, and use multilevel attention modules to enrich the characteristics at different layers to achieve more efficient multi-scale feature fusion, which is able to be used to generate a more accurate density map with dilated convolutions and a 1 × 1 convolution. The extensive experiments on three available public datasets show that our proposed network achieves outperformance to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Computer Science and Information Systems, 2022

Crowd counting has a range of applications and it is an important task that can help with the accident prevention such as crowd crushes and stampedes in political protests, concerts, sports, and other social events. Many crown counting approaches have been proposed in the recent years. In this paper we compare five deep-learning-based approaches to crowd counting, reevaluate them and present a novel CSRNet-based approach. We base our implementation on five convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures: CSRNet, Bayesian Crowd Counting, DM-Count, SFA-Net, and SGA-Net and present a novel approach by upgrading CSRNet with application of a Bayesian crowd counting loss function and pixel modeling. The models are trained and evaluated on three widely used crowd image datasets, ShanghaiTech part A, part B, and UCF-QNRF. The results show that models based on SFA-Net and DM-Count outperform state-of-the-art when trained and evaluated on the similar data, and the proposed extended model outperforms the base model with the same backbone when trained and evaluated on the significantly different data, suggesting improved robustness levels.

2018 24th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2018

We investigate generative adversarial networks as an effective solution to the crowd counting problem. These networks not only learn the mapping from crowd image to corresponding density map, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. There are many challenges to the task of crowd counting, such as severe occlusions in extremely dense crowd scenes, perspective distortion, and high visual similarity between pedestrians and background elements. To address these problems, we proposed multi-scale generative adversarial network to generate highquality crowd density maps of arbitrary crowd density scenes. We utilized the adversarial loss from discriminator to improve the quality of the estimated density map, which is critical to accurately predict crowd counts. The proposed multi-scale generator can extract multiple hierarchy features from the crowd image. The results showed that the proposed method provided better performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods .