CDADNet: Context-guided dense attentional dilated network for crowd counting

Crowd counting is a conspicuous task in computer vision owing to scale variations, perspective distortions, and complex backgrounds. Existing research usually adopts the dilated convolution network to enlarge the receptive fields to solve the problem of scale variations. However, these methods easily bring background information into the large receptive fields to generate poor quality density maps. To address this problem, we propose a novel backbone called Context-guided Dense Attentional Dilated Network (CDADNet). CDADNet contains three components: an attentional module, a context-guided module and a dense attentional dilated module. The attentional module is used to provide attention maps which can remove background information, while the context-guided module is proposed to extract multi-scale contextual information. Moreover, the dense attentional dilated module aims to generate high-granularity density maps and the cascaded strategy is used to preserve information from changing scales. To verify the feasibility of our method, we compare it to the existing approaches on five crowd counting datasets (ShanghaiTech (Part_A and Part_B), WorldEXPO’10, UCSD, UCF_CC_50). The comparison results demonstrate that CDADNet is effective and robust for various scenes.