Foreground Segmentation-Based Density Grading Networks for Crowd Counting

Estimating object counts within a single image or video frame represents a challenging yet pivotal task in the field of computer vision. Its increasing significance arises from its versatile applications across various domains, including public safety and urban planning. Among the various object counting tasks, crowd counting is particularly notable for its critical role in social security and urban planning. However, intricate backgrounds in images often lead to misidentifications, wherein the complex background is mistaken as the foreground, thereby inflating forecasting errors. Additionally, the uneven distribution of crowd density within the foreground further exacerbates predictive errors of the network. This paper introduces a novel architecture with a three-branch structure aimed at synergistically incorporating hierarchical foreground information and global scale information into density map estimation, thereby achieving more precise counting results. Hierarchical foreground information guides the network to perform distinct operations on regions with varying densities, while global scale information evaluates the overall density level of the image and adjusts the model’s global predictions accordingly. We also systematically investigate and compare three potential locations for integrating hierarchical foreground information into the density estimation network, ultimately determining the most effective placement.Through extensive comparative experiments across three datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.