Crowd Counting Method Based on Convolutional Neural Network With Global Density Feature

Crowd counting is an important research topic in the field of computer vision. The multi-column convolution neural network (MCNN) has been used in this field and achieved competitive performance. However, when the crowd distribution is uneven, the accuracy of crowd counting based on the MCNN still needs to be improved. In order to adapt to uneven crowd distributions, crowd global density feature is taken into account in this paper. The global density features are extracted and added to the MCNN through the cascaded learning method. Because some detailed features during the down-sampling process will be lost in the MCNN and it will affect the accuracy of the density map, an improved MCNN structure is proposed. In this paper, the max pooling is replaced by max-ave pooling to keep more detailed features and the deconvolutional layers are added to restore the lost details in the down-sampling process. The experimental results in the UCF_CC_50 dataset and the ShanghaiTech dataset show that the proposed method has higher accuracy and stability.