Chenhao Wang

Haoliang Meng, Xiaopeng Hong, Chenhao Wang et al.

Multi-modal crowd counting involves estimating crowd density from both visual and thermal/depth images. This task is challenging due to the significant gap between these distinct modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by introducing an auxiliary broker modality and on this basis frame the task as a triple-modal learning problem. We devise a fusion-based method to generate this broker modality, leveraging a non-diffusion, lightweight counterpart of modern denoising diffusion-based fusion models. Additionally, we identify and address the ghosting effect caused by direct cross-modal image fusion in multi-modal crowd counting. Through extensive experimental evaluations on popular multi-modal crowd-counting datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which introduces only 4 million additional parameters, yet achieves promising results. The code is available at https://github.com/HenryCilence/Broker-Modality-Crowd-Counting.

Chenhao Wang, Xiaopeng Hong, Zhiheng Ma et al.

Multi-modal crowd counting is a crucial task that uses multi-modal cues to estimate the number of people in crowded scenes. To overcome the gap between different modalities, we propose a modal emulation-based two-pass multi-modal crowd-counting framework that enables efficient modal emulation, alignment, and fusion. The framework consists of two key components: a \emph{multi-modal inference} pass and a \emph{cross-modal emulation} pass. The former utilizes a hybrid cross-modal attention module to extract global and local information and achieve efficient multi-modal fusion. The latter uses attention prompting to coordinate different modalities and enhance multi-modal alignment. We also introduce a modality alignment module that uses an efficient modal consistency loss to align the outputs of the two passes and bridge the semantic gap between modalities. Extensive experiments on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth counting datasets demonstrate its superior performance compared to previous methods. Code available at https://github.com/Mr-Monday/Multi-modal-Crowd-Counting-via-Modal-Emulation.