Occlusions, complex backgrounds, scale variations and non-uniform distributions present great challenges for crowd counting in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method using an attention model to exploit head locations which are the most important cue for crowd counting. The attention model estimates a probability map in which high probabilities indicate locations where heads are likely to be present. The estimated probability map is used to suppress non-head regions in feature maps from several multi-scale feature extraction branches of a convolution neural network for crowd density estimation, which makes our method robust to complex backgrounds, scale variations and non-uniform distributions. In addition, we introduce a relative deviation loss to compensate a commonly used training loss, Euclidean distance, to improve the accuracy of sparse crowd density estimation. Experiments on Shanghai-Tech, UCF_CC_50 and World-Expo'10 data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

本文提出了一种新颖的使用注意力模型的方法，通过利用头部位置作为人群计数的最重要线索，结合多尺度特征提取和相对偏差损失函数来实现复杂背景、尺度变化和非均匀分布等实际应用中的挑战，提高了稀疏人群密度估计的准确性。在Shanghai-Tech、UCF_CC_50和World-Expo＇10数据集上的实验表明了该方法的有效性。

关注头部位置的人群计数