Adaptive Mixture Regression Network with Local Counting Map for Crowd Counting

The crowd counting task aims at estimating the number of people located in an image or a frame from videos. Existing methods widely adopt density maps as the training targets to optimize the point-to-point loss. While in testing phase, we only focus on the differences between the crowd numbers and the global summation of density maps, which indicate the inconsistency between the training targets and the evaluation criteria. To solve this problem, we introduce a new target, named local counting map (LCM), to obtain more accurate results than density map based approaches. Moreover, we also propose an adaptive mixture regression framework with three modules in a coarse-to-fine manner to further improve the precision of the crowd estimation: scale-aware module (SAM), mixture regression module (MRM) and adaptive soft interval module (ASIM). Specifically, SAM fully utilizes the context and multi-scale information from different convolutional features; MRM and ASIM perform more precise counting regression on local patches of images. Compared with current methods, the proposed method reports better performances on the typical datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/xiyang1012/Local-Crowd-Counting.