Exploring density rectification and domain adaption method for crowd counting

Crowd counting has received increasing attention due to its important roles in multiple fields, such as social security, commercial applications, epidemic prevention and control. To this end, we explore two critical issues that seriously affect the performance of crowd counting including nonuniform crowd density distribution and cross-domain problems. Aiming at the nonuniform crowd density distribution issue, we propose a density rectifying network (DRNet) that consists of several dual-layer pyramid fusion modules (DPFM) and a density rectification map (DRmap) auxiliary learning module. The proposed DPFM is embedded into DRNet to integrate multi-scale crowd density features through dual-layer pyramid fusion. The devised DRmap auxiliary learning module further rectifies the incorrect crowd density estimation by adaptively weighting the initial crowd density maps. With respect to the cross-domain issue, we develop a domain adaptation method of randomly cutting mixed dual-domain images, which learns domain-invariance features and decreases the domain gap between the source domain and the target domain from global and local perspectives. Experimental results indicate that the devised DRNet achieves the best mean absolute error (MAE) and competitive mean squared error (MSE) compared with other excellent methods on four benchmark datasets. Additionally, a series of cross-domain experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed domain adaption method. Significantly, when the A and B parts of the Shanghaitech dataset are the source domain and target domain respectively, the proposed domain adaption method decreases the MAE of DRNet by $$ .