Aggregated context network for crowd counting

Crowd counting has been applied to a variety of applications such as video surveillance, traffic monitoring, assembly control, and other public safety applications. Context information, such as perspective distortion and background interference, is a crucial factor in achieving high performance for crowd counting. While traditional methods focus merely on solving one specific factor, we aggregate sufficient context information into the crowd counting network to tackle these problems simultaneously in this study. We build a fully convolutional network with two tasks, i.e., main density map estimation and auxiliary semantic segmentation. The main task is to extract the multi-scale and spatial context information to learn the density map. The auxiliary semantic segmentation task gives a comprehensive view of the background and foreground information, and the extracted information is finally incorporated into the main task by late fusion. We demonstrate that our network has better accuracy of estimation and higher robustness on three challenging datasets compared with state-of-the-art methods.