IET Image Processing (Dec 2021)

Learn from Object Counting: Crowd Counting with Meta‐learning

  • Changtong Zan,
  • Baodi Liu,
  • Weili Guan,
  • Kai Zhang,
  • Weifeng Liu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1049/ipr2.12241
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 14
pp. 3543 – 3550

Abstract

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Abstract The objective of crowd counting is to learn a counter that can estimate the number of people in a single image. So far, most of the proposed work evaluates the crowd density by fitting the constructed density map corresponding to the sample. The performance of those algorithms depends on a large amount of carefully prepared data. However, a significant problem with crowd data sets is the difficulty of labeling. To address such a situation, utilizing object counting data in few‐shot scenes is considered and an efficient algorithm to extract the meta‐information is proposed, thus improving the accuracy and convergence rate of the crowd counting tasks. Specifically, the counting network is trained with only object counting tasks constructed on different domains during the meta‐training phase. Then, the meta‐counter is testing on crowd counting tasks in the meta‐testing stage. Experimentally, it is demonstrated that the above way improves the converge rate and accuracy of crowd counting tasks on three crowd counting datasets when meta‐training on ten‐type object counting tasks.

Keywords