Scale-Informed Density Estimation for Dense Crowd Counting

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.