People counting and pedestrian flow statistics based on convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network

Abstract

People counting and pedestrian flow statistics are challenging tasks because of the perspective distortions, appearance changes and occlusion. In this paper, we address the two tasks: people counting in images of highly dense crowds and pedestrian flow statistics in a place over a period of time. Our first contribution is to propose a new convolution neural network (CNN) model which is composed of a deep and shallow fully convolution network to fulfill the task of people counting. We extract different layer features from the deep fully convolution network and the last layer features from the shallow fully convolution network, and concatenate them together. After that we add two deconvolution layers to make the output image have the same resolution with the input image. Our second contribution is to combine pedestrian flow statistics task with people counting task. According to the density maps that CNN model generates, we can calculate the number of people crossing a place based on the recurrent neural network (RNN). Besides, we also have collected two datasets and labelled them. Extensive experiments have been implemented, our people counting method outperforms other existing methods, and our pedestrian flow statistics method combined with CNN model also outperforms the model which only uses long-short term memory (LSTM).