# Crowd Detection Using Very-Fine-Resolution Satellite Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19546/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Tracking Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01177/) (2020)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Counting and Localization in Crowds:A Purely Point-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12746/) (2021)
- [NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03360/) (2020)
- [CARAFE: Content-Aware ReAssembly of FEatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02188/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13065/) (2022)
- [Locate, Size and Count: Accurately Resolving People in Dense Crowds via Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07538/) (2019)
- [Localization in the Crowd with Topological Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12482/) (2020)
- [Learning to Upsample by Learning to Sample](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15085/) (2023)
- [Where are the Blobs: Counting by Localization with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09856/) (2018)
- [STEERER: Resolving Scale Variations for Counting and Localization via Selective Inheritance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10468/) (2023)
- [Point-Query Quadtree for Crowd Counting, Localization, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13814/) (2023)
- [Focal Inverse Distance Transform Maps for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07925/) (2021)
- [AutoScale: Learning to Scale for Crowd Counting and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09632/) (2019)
- [Cross-View Cross-Scene Multi-View Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01551/) (2022)
- [Learning Independent Instance Maps for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04164/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate crowd detection (CD) is critical for public safety and historical pattern analysis, yet existing methods relying on ground and aerial imagery suffer from limited spatio-temporal coverage. The development of very-fine-resolution (VFR) satellite sensor imagery (e.g., ~0.3 m spatial resolution) provides unprecedented opportunities for large-scale crowd activity analysis, but it has never been considered for this task. To address this gap, we proposed CrowdSat-Net, a novel point-based convolutional neural network, which features two innovative components: Dual-Context Progressive Attention Network (DCPAN) to improve feature representation of individuals by aggregating scene context and local individual characteristics, and High-Frequency Guided Deformable Upsampler (HFGDU) that recovers high-frequency information during upsampling through frequency-domain guided deformable convolutions. To validate the effectiveness of CrowdSat-Net, we developed CrowdSat, the first VFR satellite imagery dataset designed specifically for CD tasks, comprising over 120k manually labeled individuals from multi-source satellite platforms (Beijing-3N, Jilin-1 Gaofen-04A and Google Earth) across China. In the experiments, CrowdSat-Net was compared with five state-of-the-art point-based CD methods (originally designed for ground or aerial imagery) using CrowdSat and achieved the largest F1-score of 66.12% and Precision of 73.23%, surpassing the second-best method by 1.71% and 2.42%, respectively. Moreover, extensive ablation experiments validated the importance of the DCPAN and HFGDU modules. Furthermore, cross-regional evaluation further demonstrated the spatial generalizability of CrowdSat-Net. This research advances CD capability by providing both a newly developed network architecture for CD and a pioneering benchmark dataset to facilitate future CD development.