Attention-Guided Collaborative Counting

Existing crowd counting designs usually exploit multi-branch structures to address the scale diversity problem. However, branches in these structures work in a competitive rather than collaborative way. In this paper, we focus on promoting collaboration between branches. Specifically, we propose an attention-guided collaborative counting module (AGCCM) comprising an attention-guided module (AGM) and a collaborative counting module (CCM). The CCM promotes collaboration among branches by recombining each branch's output into an independent count and joint counts with other branches. The AGM capturing the global attention map through a transformer structure with a pair of foreground-background related loss functions can distinguish the advantages of different branches. The loss functions do not require additional labels and crowd division. In addition, we design two kinds of bidirectional transformers (Bi-Transformers) to decouple the global attention to row attention and column attention. The proposed Bi-Transformers are able to reduce the computational complexity and handle images in any resolution without cropping the image into small patches. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art crowd counting methods.