A Two-Stage Approach to Important Area Detection in Gathering Place Using a Novel Multi-Input Attention Network

An important area in a gathering place is a region attracting the constant attention of people and has evident visual features, such as a flexible stage or an open-air show. Finding such areas can help security supervisors locate the abnormal regions automatically. The existing related methods lack an efficient means to find important area candidates from a scene and have failed to judge whether or not a candidate attracts people’s attention. To realize the detection of an important area, this study proposes a two-stage method with a novel multi-input attention network (MAN). The first stage, called important area candidate generation, aims to generate candidate important areas with an image-processing algorithm (i.e., K-means++, image dilation, median filtering, and the RLSA algorithm). The candidate areas can be selected automatically for further analysis. The second stage, called important area candidate classification, aims to detect an important area from candidates with MAN. In particular, MAN is designed as a multi-input network structure, which fuses global and local image features to judge whether or not an area attracts people’s attention. To enhance the representation of candidate areas, two modules (i.e., channel attention and spatial attention modules) are proposed on the basis of the attention mechanism. These modules are mainly based on multi-layer perceptron and pooling operation to reconstruct the image feature and provide considerably efficient representation. This study also contributes to a new dataset called gathering place important area detection for testing the proposed two-stage method. Lastly, experimental results show that the proposed method has good performance and can correctly detect an important area.