Multi-view Convolutional Network for Crowd Counting in Drone-Captured Images

This paper proposes a novel lightweight and fast convolutional neural network to learn a regression model for crowd counting in images captured from drones. The learning system is initially based on a multi-input model trained on two different views of the same input for the task at hand: (i) real-world images; and (ii) corresponding synthetically created “crowd heatmaps”. The synthetic input is intended to help the network focus on the most important parts of the images. The network is trained from scratch on a subset of the VisDrone dataset. During inference, the synthetic path of the network is disregarded resulting in a traditional single-view model optimized for resource-constrained devices. The derived model achieves promising results on the test images, outperforming models developed by state-of-the-art lightweight architectures that can be used for crowd counting and detection.