Crowd counting via cross-stage refinement networks

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-2020

Abstract

Crowd counting is challenging due to unconstrained imaging factors, e.g., background clutters, non-uniform distribution of people, large scale and perspective variations. Dealing with these problems using deep neural networks requires rich prior knowledge and multi-scale contextual representations. In this paper, we propose a Cross-stage Refinement Network (CRNet) that can refine predicted density maps progressively based on hierarchical multi-level density priors. In particular, CRNet is composed of several fully convolutional networks. They are stacked together recursively with the previous output as the next input, and each of them serves to utilize previous density output to gradually correct prediction errors of crowd areas and refine the predicted density maps at different stages. Cross-stage multi-level density priors are further exploited in our recurrent framework by the cross-stage skip layers based on ConvLSTM. To cope with different challenges of unconstrained crowd scenes, we explore different crowd-specific data augmentation methods to mimic real-world scenarios and enrich crowd feature representations from different aspects. Extensive experiments show the proposed method achieves superior performances against state-of-the-art methods on four widely-used challenging benchmarks in terms of counting accuracy and density map quality. Code and models are available at this https://github.com/lytgftyf/Crowd-Counting-via-Cross-stage-Refinement-Networks.

Keywords

Feature extraction, Convolution, Decoding, Clutter, Benchmark testing, Cameras, Network architecture, Crowd counting, recurrent network, image refinement

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Volume

29

First Page

6800

Last Page

6812

ISSN

1057-7149

Identifier

10.1109/TIP.2020.2994410

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TIP.2020.2994410

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