2,021 research outputs found
Crowd Counting with Decomposed Uncertainty
Research in neural networks in the field of computer vision has achieved
remarkable accuracy for point estimation. However, the uncertainty in the
estimation is rarely addressed. Uncertainty quantification accompanied by point
estimation can lead to a more informed decision, and even improve the
prediction quality. In this work, we focus on uncertainty estimation in the
domain of crowd counting. With increasing occurrences of heavily crowded events
such as political rallies, protests, concerts, etc., automated crowd analysis
is becoming an increasingly crucial task. The stakes can be very high in many
of these real-world applications. We propose a scalable neural network
framework with quantification of decomposed uncertainty using a bootstrap
ensemble. We demonstrate that the proposed uncertainty quantification method
provides additional insight to the crowd counting problem and is simple to
implement. We also show that our proposed method exhibits the state of the art
performances in many benchmark crowd counting datasets.Comment: Accepted in AAAI 2020 (Main Technical Track
PDANet: Pyramid Density-aware Attention Net for Accurate Crowd Counting
Crowd counting, i.e., estimating the number of people in a crowded area, has
attracted much interest in the research community. Although many attempts have
been reported, crowd counting remains an open real-world problem due to the
vast scale variations in crowd density within the interested area, and severe
occlusion among the crowd. In this paper, we propose a novel Pyramid
Density-Aware Attention-based network, abbreviated as PDANet, that leverages
the attention, pyramid scale feature and two branch decoder modules for
density-aware crowd counting. The PDANet utilizes these modules to extract
different scale features, focus on the relevant information, and suppress the
misleading ones. We also address the variation of crowdedness levels among
different images with an exclusive Density-Aware Decoder (DAD). For this
purpose, a classifier evaluates the density level of the input features and
then passes them to the corresponding high and low crowded DAD modules.
Finally, we generate an overall density map by considering the summation of low
and high crowded density maps as spatial attention. Meanwhile, we employ two
losses to create a precise density map for the input scene. Extensive
evaluations conducted on the challenging benchmark datasets well demonstrate
the superior performance of the proposed PDANet in terms of the accuracy of
counting and generated density maps over the well-known state of the arts
Object Counting with Deep Learning
This thesis explores various empirical aspects of deep learning or convolutional network based models for efficient object counting. First, we train moderately large convolutional networks on comparatively smaller datasets containing few hundred samples from scratch with conventional image processing based data augmentation. Then, we extend this approach for unconstrained, outdoor images using more advanced architectural concepts. Additionally, we propose an efficient, randomized data augmentation strategy based on sub-regional pixel distribution for low-resolution images.
Next, the effectiveness of depth-to-space shuffling of feature elements for efficient segmentation is investigated for simpler problems like binary segmentation -- often required in the counting framework. This depth-to-space operation violates the basic assumption of encoder-decoder type of segmentation architectures. Consequently, it helps to train the encoder model as a sparsely connected graph. Nonetheless, we have found comparable accuracy to that of the standard encoder-decoder architectures with our depth-to-space models.
After that, the subtleties regarding the lack of localization information in the conventional scalar count loss for one-look models are illustrated. At this point, without using additional annotations, a possible solution is proposed based on the regulation of a network-generated heatmap in the form of a weak, subsidiary loss. The models trained with this auxiliary loss alongside the conventional loss perform much better compared to their baseline counterparts, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Lastly, the intricacies of tiled prediction for high-resolution images are studied in detail, and a simple and effective trick of eliminating the normalization factor in an existing computational block is demonstrated. All of the approaches employed here are thoroughly benchmarked across multiple heterogeneous datasets for object counting against previous, state-of-the-art approaches
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