Application-Driven AI Paradigm for Person Counting in Various Scenarios

Person counting is considered as a fundamental task in video surveillance. However, the scenario diversity in practical applications makes it difficult to exploit a single person counting model for general use. Consequently, engineers must preview the video stream and manually specify an appropriate person counting model based on the scenario of camera shot, which is time-consuming, especially for large-scale deployments. In this paper, we propose a person counting paradigm that utilizes a scenario classifier to automatically select a suitable person counting model for each captured frame. First, the input image is passed through the scenario classifier to obtain a scenario label, which is then used to allocate the frame to one of five fine-tuned models for person counting. Additionally, we present five augmentation datasets collected from different scenarios, including side-view, long-shot, top-view, customized and crowd, which are also integrated to form a scenario classification dataset containing 26323 samples. In our comparative experiments, the proposed paradigm achieves better balance than any single model on the integrated dataset, thus its generalization in various scenarios has been proved.