Improving Point-based Crowd Counting and Localization Based on Auxiliary Point Guidance

TL;DR

This paper introduces Auxiliary Point Guidance and Implicit Feature Interpolation to improve the stability and accuracy of point-based crowd counting and localization methods, especially in challenging scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents novel guidance and feature extraction techniques that enhance matching stability and robustness in point-based crowd counting methods.

Findings

Significant performance improvements in crowd counting accuracy.

Enhanced localization precision under challenging conditions.

Robustness across diverse crowd scenarios.

Abstract

Crowd counting and localization have become increasingly important in computer vision due to their wide-ranging applications. While point-based strategies have been widely used in crowd counting methods, they face a significant challenge, i.e., the lack of an effective learning strategy to guide the matching process. This deficiency leads to instability in matching point proposals to target points, adversely affecting overall performance. To address this issue, we introduce an effective approach to stabilize the proposal-target matching in point-based methods. We propose Auxiliary Point Guidance (APG) to provide clear and effective guidance for proposal selection and optimization, addressing the core issue of matching uncertainty. Additionally, we develop Implicit Feature Interpolation (IFI) to enable adaptive feature extraction in diverse crowd scenarios, further enhancing the model's robustness and accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing significant improvements in crowd counting and localization performance, particularly under challenging conditions. The source codes and trained models will be made publicly available.