Leveraging Heterogeneous Auxiliary Tasks to Assist Crowd Counting

Muming Zhao, Jian Zhang, Chongyang Zhang, Wenjun Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 12736-12745

Crowd counting is a challenging task in the presence of drastic scale variations, the clutter background, and severe occlusions, etc. Existing CNN-based counting methods tackle these challenges mainly by fusing either multi-scale or multi-context features to generate robust representations. In this paper, we propose to address these issues by leveraging the heterogeneous attributes compounded in the density map. We identify three geometric/semantic/numeric attributes essentially important to the density estimation, and demonstrate how to effectively utilize these heterogeneous attributes to assist the crowd counting by formulating them into multiple auxiliary tasks. With the multi-fold regularization effects induced by the auxiliary tasks, the backbone CNN model is driven to embed desired properties explicitly and thus gains robust representations towards more accurate density estimation. Extensive experiments on three challenging crowd counting datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.