Single Convolutional Neural Network with Three Layers Model for Crowd Density Estimation

Abstract

Crowd density estimation is an important topic in computer vision due to its widespread applications in surveillance, urban planning, and intelligence gathering. Resulting from extensive analysis, crowd density estimation reflects many aspects such as similarity of appearance between people, background components, and inter-blocking in intense crowds. In this paper, we are interested to apply machine learning for crowd management in order to monitor populated area and prevent congestion situations. We propose a Single-Convolutional Neural Network with Three Layers (S-CNN3) model to count the number of people in a scene and conclude about the crowd estimation. Then, a comparative study for density counting establishes the performance of the proposed model against the convolutional neural networks with four layers (single-CNN4) and Switched Convolutional neural networks (SCNN). ShanghaiTech dataset, considered as the largest data base for crowd counting, is used in this work. The proposed model proves high effectiveness and efficiency for crowd density estimation with 99.88% of average test accuracy and 0.02 of average validation loss. These results achieve better performance than the existing state-of-the-art models.