Automatic estimation of the number of people in unconstrained crowded scenes is a challenging task and one major difficulty stems from the huge scale variation of people. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Structured Scale Integration Network (DSSINet) for crowd counting, which addresses the scale variation of people by using structured feature representation learning and hierarchically structured loss function optimization. Unlike conventional methods which directly fuse multiple features with weighted average or concatenation, we first introduce a Structured Feature Enhancement Module based on conditional random fields (CRFs) to refine multiscale features mutually with a message passing mechanism. In this module, each scale-specific feature is considered as a continuous random variable and passes complementary information to refine the features at other scales. Second, we utilize a Dilated Multiscale Structural Similarity loss to enforce our DSSINet to learn the local correlation of people's scales within regions of various size, thus yielding high-quality density maps. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmarks well demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, our DSSINet achieves improvements of 9.5 error reduction on Shanghaitech dataset and 24.9 on UCF-QNRF dataset against the state-of-the-art methods.
Conditional Random Fields: In the field of computer vision, CRFs have been exploited to refine the features and outputs of convolutional neural networks (CNN) with a message passing mechanism @cite_25 . For instance, @cite_29 used CRFs to refine the semantic segmentation maps of CNN by modeling the relationship among pixels. @cite_44 fused multiple features with Attention-Gated CRFs to produce richer representations for contour prediction. @cite_28 introduced an inter-view message passing module based on CRFs to enhance the view-specific features for action recognition.
@cite_44 @cite_29 @cite_28 @cite_25
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Large amounts of available training data and increasing computing power have led to the recent success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) on a large number of applications. In this paper, we propose an effective semantic pixel labelling using CNN features, hand-crafted features and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). Both CNN and hand-crafted features are applied to dense image patches to produce per-pixel class probabilities. The CRF infers a labelling that smooths regions while respecting the edges present in the imagery. The method is applied to the ISPRS 2D semantic labelling challenge dataset with competitive classification accuracy. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the backbone of state-of-art semantic image segmentation systems. Recent work has shown that complementing CNNs with fully-connected conditional random fields (CRFs) can significantly enhance their object localization accuracy, yet dense CRF inference is computationally expensive. We propose replacing the fully-connected CRF with domain transform (DT), a modern edge-preserving filtering method in which the amount of smoothing is controlled by a reference edge map. Domain transform filtering is several times faster than dense CRF inference and we show that it yields comparable semantic segmentation results, accurately capturing object boundaries. Importantly, our formulation allows learning the reference edge map from intermediate CNN features instead of using the image gradient magnitude as in standard DT filtering. This produces task-specific edges in an end-to-end trainable system optimizing the target semantic segmentation quality. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the backbone of state-of-art semantic image segmentation systems. Recent work has shown that complementing CNNs with fully-connected conditional random fields (CRFs) can significantly enhance their object localization accuracy, yet dense CRF inference is computationally expensive. We propose replacing the fully-connected CRF with domain transform (DT), a modern edge-preserving filtering method in which the amount of smoothing is controlled by a reference edge map. Domain transform filtering is several times faster than dense CRF inference and we show that it yields comparable semantic segmentation results, accurately capturing object boundaries. Importantly, our formulation allows learning the reference edge map from intermediate CNN features instead of using the image gradient magnitude as in standard DT filtering. This produces task-specific edges in an end-to-end trainable system optimizing the target semantic segmentation quality. Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are an effective tool for a variety of different data segmentation and labeling tasks including visual scene interpretation, which seeks to partition images into their constituent semantic-level regions and assign appropriate class labels to each region. For accurate labeling it is important to capture the global context of the image as well as local information. We introduce a CRF based scene labeling model that incorporates both local features and features aggregated over the whole image or large sections of it. Secondly, traditional CRF learning requires fully labeled datasets which can be costly and troublesome to produce. We introduce a method for learning CRFs from datasets with many unlabeled nodes by marginalizing out the unknown labels so that the log-likelihood of the known ones can be maximized by gradient ascent. Loopy Belief Propagation is used to approximate the marginals needed for the gradient and log-likelihood calculations and the Bethe free-energy approximation to the log-likelihood is monitored to control the step size. Our experimental results show that effective models can be learned from fragmentary labelings and that incorporating top-down aggregate features significantly improves the segmentations. The resulting segmentations are compared to the state-of-the-art on three different image datasets.