Benchmarking Crowd-Counting Techniques across Image Characteristics

ABSTRACT

Crowd-counting is a longstanding computer vision used in estimating the crowd sizes for security purposes at public protests in streets, public gatherings, for collecting crowd statistics at airports, malls, concerts, conferences, and other similar venues, and for monitoring people and crowds during public health crises (such as the one caused by COVID-19). Recently, the performance of automated methods for crowd-counting from single images has improved particularly due to the introduction of deep learning techniques and large labelled training datasets. However, the robustness of these methods to varying imaging conditions, such as weather, image perspective, and large variations in the crowd size has not been studied in-depth in the open literature. To address this gap, a systematic study on the robustness of four recently developed crowd-counting methods is performed in this paper to evaluate their performance with respect to variable (real-life) imaging scenarios that include different event types, weather conditions, image sources and crowd sizes. It is shown that the performance of the tested techniques is degraded in unclear weather conditions (i.e., fog, rain, snow) and also on images taken from large distances by drones. On the opposite, clear weather conditions, crowd-counting methods can provide accurate and usable results. © 2021 Electrotechnical Society of Slovenia. All rights reserved.