DMPNet: densely connected multi-scale pyramid networks for crowd counting

Crowd counting has been widely studied by deep learning in recent years. However, due to scale variation caused by perspective distortion, crowd counting is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Densely Connected Multi-scale Pyramid Network (DMPNet) for count estimation and the generation of high-quality density maps. The key component of our network is the Multi-scale Pyramid Network (MPN), which can extract multi-scale features of the crowd effectively while keeping the resolution of the input feature map and the number of channels unchanged. To increase the information transfer between the network layer, we used dense connections to connect multiple MPNs. In addition, we also designed a novel loss function, which can help our model achieve better convergence. To evaluate our method, we conducted extensive experiments on three challenging benchmark crowd counting datasets. Experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms, DMPNet performs well in both parameters and results. The code is available at: https://github.com/lpfworld/DMPNet.