Direct Measure Matching for Crowd Counting
This addresses crowd counting accuracy for applications like surveillance and public safety, representing a novel methodological improvement.
The paper tackles inaccurate density map estimation in crowd counting by proposing a measure-based approach that directly matches predicted density maps to point-annotated ground truth, achieving state-of-the-art results on four challenging datasets.
Traditional crowd counting approaches usually use Gaussian assumption to generate pseudo density ground truth, which suffers from problems like inaccurate estimation of the Gaussian kernel sizes. In this paper, we propose a new measure-based counting approach to regress the predicted density maps to the scattered point-annotated ground truth directly. First, crowd counting is formulated as a measure matching problem. Second, we derive a semi-balanced form of Sinkhorn divergence, based on which a Sinkhorn counting loss is designed for measure matching. Third, we propose a self-supervised mechanism by devising a Sinkhorn scale consistency loss to resist scale changes. Finally, an efficient optimization method is provided to minimize the overall loss function. Extensive experiments on four challenging crowd counting datasets namely ShanghaiTech, UCF-QNRF, JHU++, and NWPU have validated the proposed method.