Adversarial scale-adaptive neural network for crowd counting

Crowd counting aims to count the number of pedestrians in an image or a video. Currently, scale variations in crowd counting are inevitable and challenging in practice. Besides, for the crowd counting task, there is only a small amount of annotated data available. It can be seen from previous methods of crowd counting and object detection that the two tasks have similar attention areas. However, existing methods in crowd counting generally ignore the similarities and specialties between the crowd counting task and the object detection task. In this paper, in order to solve the above challenges, we propose an adversarial scale-adaptive neural network (ASANet), consisting of three branches. First, a private branch for the crowd counting task concentrates on generating high-quality density maps. Second, another private branch for the object detection task aims to correctly detect and recognize objects. Third, we design a common branch to learn the similar attention area of the two tasks and assist crowd counting. Experimental results demonstrate an outstanding performance of the ASANet over state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets (ShanghaiTech, UCF_CC_50, and UCF_QNRF). (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Crowd counting faces challenges of scale variations and limited annotated data, while having similarities with object detection in attention areas. Existing methods often overlook these similarities and specialties. The proposed ASANet tackles these challenges with three branches and demonstrates outstanding performance on public datasets.