Improving Crowd Counting with Multi-Task Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network

Counting the number of person has received much attention in recent years. Most of the existing crowd counting methods adopted density map regression pipeline, which formulates the crowd counting problem to two fragmented part: density map regression and integration of the overall counting. To solve this problem, this paper presents a multi-task deep learning scheme to enhance the counting performance. More specifically, we firstly build a multi-scale deep convolutional neural network, based on combining the feature maps of conv layers with different filters, to solve the multi-scale problem in crowd counting. Secondly, we develop the multi-task structure that can simultaneously learn the density map and the global counting. Experiments on large scale crowd counting datasets, Shanghaitech and WorldExpo10, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much reduction in counting error respectively