Locating and Counting Heads in Crowds With a Depth Prior

To simultaneously estimate the number of heads and locate heads with bounding boxes, we resort to detection-based crowd counting by leveraging RGB-D data and design a dual-path guided detection network (DPDNet). Specifically, to improve the performance of detection-based approaches for dense/tiny heads, we propose a density map guided detection module, which leverages density map to improve the head/non-head classification in detection network where the density implies the probability of a pixel being a head, and a depth-adaptive kernel that considers the variances in head sizes is also introduced to generate high-fidelity density map for more robust density map regression. In order to prevent dense heads from being filtered out during post-processing, we utilize such a density map for post-processing of head detection and propose a density map guided NMS strategy. Meanwhile, to improve the ability of detecting small heads, we also propose a depth-guided detection module to generate a dynamic dilated convolution to extract features of heads of different scales, and a depth-aware anchor is further designed for better initialization of anchor sizes in the detection framework. Then we use the bounding boxes whose sizes are generated with depth to train our DPDNet. Considering that existing RGB-D datasets are too small and not suitable for performance evaluation of data-driven based approaches, we collect two large-scale RGB-D crowd counting datasets, which comprise a synthetic dataset and a real-world dataset, respectively. Since the depth value at long-distance positions cannot be obtained in the real-world dataset, we further propose a depth completion method with meta learning, which fully utilizes the synthetic depth data to complete the depth value at long-distance positions. Extensive experiments on our proposed two RGB-D datasets and the MICC RGB-D counting dataset show that our method achieves the best performance for RGB-D crowd counting and localization. Further, our method can be easily extended to RGB image based crowd counting and achieves comparable or even better performance on the RGB datasets for both head counting and localization.