Scale-Informed Density Estimation for Dense Crowd Counting

Abstract

Dense crowd counting (DCC) remains challenging due to the scale variation and occlusion. Several deep learning based DCC methods have achieved the state-of-arts on public datasets. However, experimental results show that the scale variation is still the main factor to hinder the DCC performance. In this work, we propose a scale-informed dense crowd counting method focusing on handling the negative effect caused by scale variation. More specifically, we propose a method to obtain the scale information of the patch from its GT density maps via estimating the mean value of the Gaussian kernel width and then a scale-classifier is deigned and trained accordingly. Moreover, with the estimated scale information, two sub-nets are dedicatedly deigned to learn the density maps for large-scale head patch and small-scale patch separately. Experimental results validate the performance of our proposed method which achieves the best performance on three dense crowd datasets.