Dual Path Multi-Scale Fusion Networks with Attention for Crowd Counting

The task of crowd counting in varying density scenes is an extremely difficult challenge due to large scale variations. In this paper, we propose a novel dual path multi-scale fusion network architecture with attention mechanism named SFANet that can perform accurate count estimation as well as present high-resolution density maps for highly congested crowd scenes. The proposed SFANet contains two main components: a VGG backbone convolutional neural network (CNN) as the front-end feature map extractor and a dual path multi-scale fusion networks as the back-end to generate density map. These dual path multi-scale fusion networks have the same structure, one path is responsible for generating attention map by highlighting crowd regions in images, the other path is responsible for fusing multi-scale features as well as attention map to generate the final high-quality high-resolution density maps. SFANet can be easily trained in an end-to-end way by dual path joint training. We have evaluated our method on four crowd counting datasets (ShanghaiTech, UCF CC 50, UCSD and UCF-QRNF). The results demonstrate that with attention mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion, the proposed SFANet achieves the best performance on all these datasets and generates better quality density maps compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.