Multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting

Abstract Crowd counting aims to estimate the number, density, and distribution of crowds in an image. While CNN-based crowd counting methods have been effective, head-scale variation and complex background remain two major challenges for crowd counting. Therefore, we propose a multiscale region cali...

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Main Authors: Jiamao Yu, Hexuan Hu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-01-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86247-w
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author Jiamao Yu
Hexuan Hu
author_facet Jiamao Yu
Hexuan Hu
author_sort Jiamao Yu
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Crowd counting aims to estimate the number, density, and distribution of crowds in an image. While CNN-based crowd counting methods have been effective, head-scale variation and complex background remain two major challenges for crowd counting. Therefore, we propose a multiscale region calibration network called MRCNet to effectively address these challenges. To address the former challenge, we design a multiscale aware module that utilizes multi-branch dilated convolutional parallelism to obtain multiscale receptive fields and cope with drastic changes in head size. For the latter challenge, we design a regional calibration module that calibrates the attention weights of each region after obtaining the attention map to effectively handle challenges in complex contexts. Additionally, we improve the loss function by combining L2 loss and binary cross-entropy loss to help MRCNet achieve excellent results. Extensive experiments were conducted on three mainstream datasets to demonstrate the robustness and competitiveness of our approach.
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institution Kabale University
issn 2045-2322
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spelling doaj-art-02a7b25ffdb4482298689bf740f997ab2025-01-26T12:29:02ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222025-01-0115111210.1038/s41598-025-86247-wMultiscale regional calibration network for crowd countingJiamao Yu0Hexuan Hu1College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai UniversityCollege of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai UniversityAbstract Crowd counting aims to estimate the number, density, and distribution of crowds in an image. While CNN-based crowd counting methods have been effective, head-scale variation and complex background remain two major challenges for crowd counting. Therefore, we propose a multiscale region calibration network called MRCNet to effectively address these challenges. To address the former challenge, we design a multiscale aware module that utilizes multi-branch dilated convolutional parallelism to obtain multiscale receptive fields and cope with drastic changes in head size. For the latter challenge, we design a regional calibration module that calibrates the attention weights of each region after obtaining the attention map to effectively handle challenges in complex contexts. Additionally, we improve the loss function by combining L2 loss and binary cross-entropy loss to help MRCNet achieve excellent results. Extensive experiments were conducted on three mainstream datasets to demonstrate the robustness and competitiveness of our approach.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86247-wCrowd countingMultiscaleRegional calibrationFeature aggregation
spellingShingle Jiamao Yu
Hexuan Hu
Multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting
Scientific Reports
Crowd counting
Multiscale
Regional calibration
Feature aggregation
title Multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting
title_full Multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting
title_fullStr Multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting
title_full_unstemmed Multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting
title_short Multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting
title_sort multiscale regional calibration network for crowd counting
topic Crowd counting
Multiscale
Regional calibration
Feature aggregation
url https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86247-w
work_keys_str_mv AT jiamaoyu multiscaleregionalcalibrationnetworkforcrowdcounting
AT hexuanhu multiscaleregionalcalibrationnetworkforcrowdcounting