Ambient Sound Helps: Audiovisual Crowd Counting in Extreme Conditions
This work addresses crowd counting for public safety and monitoring applications, but it is incremental as it extends existing visual methods by adding audio.
The paper tackles the problem of crowd counting in extreme conditions like low light and occlusion by integrating auditory information with visual data, resulting in improved performance across different illumination, noise, and occlusion scenarios.
Visual crowd counting has been recently studied as a way to enable people counting in crowd scenes from images. Albeit successful, vision-based crowd counting approaches could fail to capture informative features in extreme conditions, e.g., imaging at night and occlusion. In this work, we introduce a novel task of audiovisual crowd counting, in which visual and auditory information are integrated for counting purposes. We collect a large-scale benchmark, named auDiovISual Crowd cOunting (DISCO) dataset, consisting of 1,935 images and the corresponding audio clips, and 170,270 annotated instances. In order to fuse the two modalities, we make use of a linear feature-wise fusion module that carries out an affine transformation on visual and auditory features. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using the proposed dataset and approach. Experimental results show that introducing auditory information can benefit crowd counting under different illumination, noise, and occlusion conditions. The dataset and code will be released. Code and data have been made available