Zengfu Wang

Jiwei Chen, Wen Su, Zengfu Wang

Crowd counting is a challenging problem due to the scene complexity and scale variation. Although deep learning has achieved great improvement in crowd counting, scene complexity affects the judgement of these methods and they usually regard some objects as people mistakenly; causing potentially enormous errors in the crowd counting result. To address the problem, we propose a novel end-to-end model called Crowd Attention Convolutional Neural Network (CAT-CNN). Our CAT-CNN can adaptively assess the importance of a human head at each pixel location by automatically encoding a confidence map. With the guidance of the confidence map, the position of human head in estimated density map gets more attention to encode the final density map, which can avoid enormous misjudgements effectively. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the final density map. To encode a highly refined density map, the total crowd count of each image is classified in a designed classification task and we first explicitly map the prior of the population-level category to feature maps. To verify the efficiency of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on three highly challenging datasets. Results establish the superiority of our method over many state-of-the-art methods.

Jiwei Chen, Kewei Wang, Wen Su et al.

Crowd counting based on density maps is generally regarded as a regression task.Deep learning is used to learn the mapping between image content and crowd density distribution. Although great success has been achieved, some pedestrians far away from the camera are difficult to be detected. And the number of hard examples is often larger. Existing methods with simple Euclidean distance algorithm indiscriminately optimize the hard and easy examples so that the densities of hard examples are usually incorrectly predicted to be lower or even zero, which results in large counting errors. To address this problem, we are the first to propose the Hard Example Focusing(HEF) algorithm for the regression task of crowd counting. The HEF algorithm makes our model rapidly focus on hard examples by attenuating the contribution of easy examples.Then higher importance will be given to the hard examples with wrong estimations. Moreover, the scale variations in crowd scenes are large, and the scale annotations are labor-intensive and expensive. By proposing a multi-Scale Semantic Refining (SSR) strategy, lower layers of our model can break through the limitation of deep learning to capture semantic features of different scales to sufficiently deal with the scale variation. We perform extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets to verify the proposed method. Results indicate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our designed model is smaller and faster.

Jiwei Chen, Zengfu Wang

Deep learning occupies an undisputed dominance in crowd counting. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture called SegCrowdNet. Despite the complex background in crowd scenes, the proposeSegCrowdNet still adaptively highlights the human head region and suppresses the non-head region by segmentation. With the guidance of an attention mechanism, the proposed SegCrowdNet pays more attention to the human head region and automatically encodes the highly refined density map. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the density map. To adapt the variation of crowd counts, SegCrowdNet intelligently classifies the crowd count of each image into several groups. In addition, the multi-scale features are learned and extracted in the proposed SegCrowdNet to overcome the scale variations of the crowd. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed SegCrowdNet achieves excellent performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Yin Lin, Yehansen Chen, Baocai Yin et al.

Recently, visual-language learning (VLL) has shown great potential in enhancing visual-based person re-identification (ReID). Existing VLL-based ReID methods typically focus on image-text feature alignment at the whole-body level, while neglecting supervision on fine-grained part features, thus lacking constraints for local feature semantic consistency. To this end, we propose Part-Informed Visual-language Learning ($π$-VL) to enhance fine-grained visual features with part-informed language supervisions for ReID tasks. Specifically, $π$-VL introduces a human parsing-guided prompt tuning strategy and a hierarchical visual-language alignment paradigm to ensure within-part feature semantic consistency. The former combines both identity labels and human parsing maps to constitute pixel-level text prompts, and the latter fuses multi-scale visual features with a light-weight auxiliary head to perform fine-grained image-text alignment. As a plug-and-play and inference-free solution, our $π$-VL achieves performance comparable to or better than state-of-the-art methods on four commonly used ReID benchmarks. Notably, it reports 91.0% Rank-1 and 76.9% mAP on the challenging MSMT17 database, without bells and whistles.

Jia Li, Linhua Xiang, Jiwei Chen et al.

We propose a simple yet reliable bottom-up approach with a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for the problem of multi-person pose estimation. Given an image, we employ an Hourglass Network to infer all the keypoints from different persons indiscriminately as well as the guiding offsets connecting the adjacent keypoints belonging to the same persons. Then, we greedily group the candidate keypoints into multiple human poses (if any), utilizing the predicted guiding offsets. And we refer to this process as greedy offset-guided keypoint grouping (GOG). Moreover, we revisit the encoding-decoding method for the multi-person keypoint coordinates and reveal some important facts affecting accuracy. Experiments have demonstrated the obvious performance improvements brought by the introduced components. Our approach is comparable to the state of the art on the challenging COCO dataset under fair conditions. The source code and our pre-trained model are publicly available online.

Yinglu Liu, Hao Shen, Yue Si et al.

Facial landmark localization is a very crucial step in numerous face related applications, such as face recognition, facial pose estimation, face image synthesis, etc. However, previous competitions on facial landmark localization (i.e., the 300-W, 300-VW and Menpo challenges) aim to predict 68-point landmarks, which are incompetent to depict the structure of facial components. In order to overcome this problem, we construct a challenging dataset, named JD-landmark. Each image is manually annotated with 106-point landmarks. This dataset covers large variations on pose and expression, which brings a lot of difficulties to predict accurate landmarks. We hold a 106-point facial landmark localization competition1 on this dataset in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2019. The purpose of this competition is to discover effective and robust facial landmark localization approaches.