text: We propose a novel crowd counting model that maps a given crowd scene to its density. Crowd analysis is compounded by myriad of factors like inter-occlusion between people due to extreme crowding, high similarity of appearance between people and background elements, and large variability of camera view-points. Current state-of-the art approaches tackle these factors by using multi-scale CNN architectures, recurrent networks and late fusion of features from multi-column CNN with different receptive fields. We propose switching convolutional neural network that leverages variation of crowd density within an image to improve the accuracy and localization of the predicted crowd count. Patches from a grid within a crowd scene are relayed to independent CNN regressors based on crowd count prediction quality of the CNN established during training. The independent CNN regressors are designed to have different receptive fields and a switch classifier is trained to relay the crowd scene patch to the best CNN regressor. We perform extensive experiments on all major crowd counting datasets and evidence better performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods. We provide interpretable representations of the multichotomy of space of crowd scene patches inferred from the switch. It is observed that the switch relays an image patch to a particular CNN column based on density of crowd.
  @cite_14: 
  @cite_6: We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed "Inception", which was responsible for setting the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC 2014). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. This was achieved by a carefully crafted design that allows for increasing the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC 2014 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.
  @cite_19: This paper describes a pedestrian detection system that integrates image intensity information with motion information. We use a detection style algorithm that scans a detector over two consecutive frames of a video sequence. The detector is trained (using AdaBoost) to take advantage of both motion and appearance information to detect a walking person. Past approaches have built detectors based on motion information or detectors based on appearance information, but ours is the first to combine both sources of information in a single detector. The implementation described runs at about 4 frames second, detects pedestrians at very small scales (as small as 20 × 15 pixels), and has a very low false positive rate. Our approach builds on the detection work of Viola and Jones. Novel contributions of this paper include: (i) development of a representation of image motion which is extremely efficient, and (ii) implementation of a state of the art pedestrian detection system which operates on low resolution images under difficult conditions (such as rain and snow).
  @cite_15: Current people detectors operate either by scanning an image in a sliding window fashion or by classifying a discrete set of proposals. We propose a model that is based on decoding an image into a set of people detections. Our system takes an image as input and directly outputs a set of distinct detection hypotheses. Because we generate predictions jointly, common post-processing steps such as non-maximum suppression are unnecessary. We use a recurrent LSTM layer for sequence generation and train our model end-to-end with a new loss function that operates on sets of detections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging task of detecting people in crowded scenes.
  @cite_17: This paper proposes a method for human detection in crowded scene from static images. An individual human is modeled as an assembly of natural body parts. We introduce edgelet features, which are a new type of silhouette oriented features. Part detectors, based on these features, are learned by a boosting method. Responses of part detectors are combined to form a joint likelihood model that includes cases of multiple, possibly inter-occluded humans. The human detection problem is formulated as maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. We show results on a commonly used previous dataset as well as new data sets that could not be processed by earlier methods.
summary: Crowd counting has been tackled in computer vision by a myriad of techniques. Crowd counting via head detections has been tackled by @cite_17 @cite_14 @cite_19 using motion cues and appearance features to train detectors. Recurrent network framework has been used for head detections in crowd scenes by @cite_15 . They use the deep features from Googlenet @cite_6 in an LSTM framework to regress bounding boxes for heads in a crowd scene. However, crowd counting using head detections has limitations as it fails in dense crowds, which are characterized by high inter-occlusion between people.