High-density object counting in surveillance scenes is challenging mainly due to the drastic variation of object scales. The prevalence of deep learning has largely boosted the object counting accuracy on several benchmark datasets. However, does the global counts really count? Armed with this question we dive into the predicted density map whose summation over the whole regions reports the global counts for more in-depth analysis. We observe that the object density map generated by most existing methods usually lacks of local consistency, i.e., counting errors in local regions exist unexpectedly even though the global count seems to well match with the ground-truth. Towards this problem, in this paper we propose a constrained multi-stage Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to jointly pursue locally consistent density map from two aspects. Different from most existing methods that mainly rely on the multi-column architectures of plain CNNs, we exploit a stacking formulation of plain CNNs. Benefited from the internal multi-stage learning process, the feature map could be repeatedly refined, allowing the density map to approach the ground-truth density distribution. For further refinement of the density map, we also propose a grid loss function. With finer local-region-based supervisions, the underlying model is constrained to generate locally consistent density values to minimize the training errors considering both the global and local counts accuracy. Experiments on two widely-tested object counting benchmarks with overall significant results compared with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Traditional detection-based counting methods mainly rely on the performance of object detection algorithms @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_15 and are usually fragile especially in crowded scenes with limited object sizes and severe occlusions. Alternatively, early regression approaches directly learn a mapping function from foreground representations to the corresponding counts @cite_26 @cite_4 , avoiding explicit delineation of individuals. However, this global regression approach ignores the useful spatial information. Towards this goal, a novel framework is proposed in the seminal work @cite_9 , which formulates object counting as a spatial density map prediction problem. With a continuously-valued density assigned for every single pixel, the final object counts can be obtained by summation of the pixel values over the whole density map. Enabling the utilization of spatial information, counting by density map prediction has been a widely-adopted paradigm for later counting approaches @cite_10 @cite_27 . However, the representation ability of hand-crafted features limits the performance of those methods, especially for more challenging situations with severe occlusions and drastic object scale variations. Following our analysis in , our solution to the local inconsistency problem is related to those counting methods handling the object scale variation, which we will give a detailed discussion below.
@cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_10 @cite_9 @cite_27 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_13
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For crowded scenes, the accuracy of object-based computer vision methods declines when the images are low-resolution and objects have severe occlusions. Taking counting methods for example, almost all the recent state-of-the-art counting methods bypass explicit detection and adopt regression-based methods to directly count the objects of interest. Among regression-based methods, density map estimation, where the number of objects inside a subregion is the integral of the density map over that subregion, is especially promising because it preserves spatial information, which makes it useful for both counting and localization (detection and tracking). With the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) the counting performance has improved steadily. The goal of this paper is to evaluate density maps generated by density estimation methods on a variety of crowd analysis tasks, including counting, detection, and tracking. Most existing CNN methods produce density maps with resolution that is smaller than the original images, due to the downsample strides in the convolution pooling operations. To produce an original-resolution density map, we also evaluate a classical CNN that uses a sliding window regressor to predict the density for every pixel in the image. We also consider a fully convolutional (FCNN) adaptation, with skip connections from lower convolutional layers to compensate for loss in spatial information during upsampling. In our experiments, we found that the lower-resolution density maps sometimes have better counting performance. In contrast, the original-resolution density maps improved localization tasks, such as detection and tracking, compared to bilinear upsampling the lower-resolution density maps. Finally, we also propose several metrics for measuring the quality of a density map, and relate them to experiment results on counting and localization. For crowded scenes, the accuracy of object-based computer vision methods declines when the images are low-resolution and objects have severe occlusions. Taking counting methods for example, almost all the recent state-of-the-art counting methods bypass explicit detection and adopt regression-based methods to directly count the objects of interest. Among regression-based methods, density map estimation, where the number of objects inside a subregion is the integral of the density map over that subregion, is especially promising because it preserves spatial information, which makes it useful for both counting and localization (detection and tracking). With the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) the counting performance has improved steadily. The goal of this paper is to evaluate density maps generated by density estimation methods on a variety of crowd analysis tasks, including counting, detection, and tracking. Most existing CNN methods produce density maps with resolution that is smaller than the original images, due to the downsample strides in the convolution pooling operations. To produce an original-resolution density map, we also evaluate a classical CNN that uses a sliding window regressor to predict the density for every pixel in the image. We also consider a fully convolutional adaptation, with skip connections from lower convolutional layers to compensate for loss in spatial information during upsampling. In our experiments, we found that the lower-resolution density maps sometimes have better counting performance. In contrast, the original-resolution density maps improved localization tasks, such as detection and tracking, compared with bilinear upsampling the lower-resolution density maps. Finally, we also propose several metrics for measuring the quality of a density map, and relate them to experiment results on counting and localization. We propose a new method to count objects of specific categories that are significantly smaller than the ground sampling distance of a satellite image. This task is hard due to the cluttered nature of scenes where different object categories occur. Target objects can be partially occluded, vary in appearance within the same class and look alike to different categories. Since traditional object detection is infeasible due to the small size of objects with respect to the pixel size, we cast object counting as a density estimation problem. To distinguish objects of different classes, our approach combines density estimation with semantic segmentation in an end-to-end learnable convolutional neural network (CNN). Experiments show that deep semantic density estimation can robustly count objects of various classes in cluttered scenes. Experiments also suggest that we need specific CNN architectures in remote sensing instead of blindly applying existing ones from computer vision. In this paper, we address the task of object counting in images. We follow modern learning approaches in which a density map is estimated directly from the input image. We employ CNNs and incorporate two significant improvements to the state of the art methods: layered boosting and selective sampling. As a result, we manage both to increase the counting accuracy and to reduce processing time. Moreover, we show that the proposed method is effective, even in the presence of labeling errors. Extensive experiments on five different datasets demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our approach. Mean Absolute error was reduced by 20 to 35 . At the same time, the training time of each CNN has been reduced by 50 .