Active View Selection for Scene-level Multi-view Crowd Counting and Localization with Limited Labeling Budget

Multi-view crowd counting and localization fuse the input multi-views for estimating the crowd number or locations on the ground. Existing methods mainly focus on accurately predicting on the crowd shown in the input views, which neglects the problem of choosing the `best' camera views to perceive all crowds well in the scene. Besides, existing view selection methods require massive labeled views and images, and lack the ability for cross-scene settings, reducing their application scenarios. Thus, in this paper, we study the view selection issue for better scene-level multi-view crowd counting and localization results with cross-scene ability and limited label demand, instead of input-view-level results. We first propose an independent view selection method (IVS) that considers view and scene geometries in the view selection strategy and conducts the view selection, labeling, and downstream tasks independently. Based on IVS, we also put forward an active view selection method (AVS) that jointly conducts the view selection, labeling, and downstream tasks. In AVS, we actively select the labeled views and consider both the view/scene geometries and the predictions of the downstream task models in the view selection process. Experiments on multi-view counting and localization tasks demonstrate the cross-scene and the limited label demand advantages of the proposed active view selection method (AVS), outperforming existing methods and with wider application scenarios.