The task of crowd counting in varying density scenes is an extremely difficult challenge due to large scale variations. In this paper, we propose a novel dual path multi-scale fusion network architecture with attention mechanism named SFANet that can perform accurate count estimation as well as present high-resolution density maps for highly congested crowd scenes. The proposed SFANet contains two main components: a VGG backbone convolutional neural network (CNN) as the front-end feature map extractor and a dual path multi-scale fusion networks as the back-end to generate density map. These dual path multi-scale fusion networks have the same structure, one path is responsible for generating attention map by highlighting crowd regions in images, the other path is responsible for fusing multi-scale features as well as attention map to generate the final high-quality high-resolution density maps. SFANet can be easily trained in an end-to-end way by dual path joint training. We have evaluated our method on four crowd counting datasets (ShanghaiTech, UCF CC 50, UCSD and UCF-QRNF). The results demonstrate that with attention mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion, the proposed SFANet achieves the best performance on all these datasets and generates better quality density maps compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.
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