Over the last decade, there has been a remarkable surge in interest in automated crowd monitoring within the computer vision community. Modern deep-learning approaches have made it possible to develop fully-automated vision-based crowd-monitoring applications. However, despite the magnitude of the issue at hand, the significant technological advancements, and the consistent interest of the research community, there are still numerous challenges that need to be overcome. In this article, we delve into six major areas of visual crowd analysis, emphasizing the key developments in each of these areas. We outline the crucial unresolved issues that must be tackled in future works, in order to ensure that the field of automated crowd monitoring continues to progress and thrive. Several surveys related to this topic have been conducted in the past. Nonetheless, this article thoroughly examines and presents a more intuitive categorization of works, while also depicting the latest breakthroughs within the field, incorporating more recent studies carried out within the last few years in a concise manner. By carefully choosing prominent works with significant contributions in terms of novelty or performance gains, this paper presents a more comprehensive exposition of advancements in the current state-of-the-art.
The rapid development in visual crowd analysis shows a trend to count people by positioning or even detecting, rather than simply summing a density map. It also enlightens us back to the essence of the field, detection to count, which can give more abundant crowd information and has more practical applications. However, some recent work on crowd localization and detection has two limitations: 1) The typical detection methods can not handle the dense crowds and a large variation in scale; 2) The density map heuristic methods suffer from performance deficiency in position and box prediction, especially in high density or large-size crowds. In this paper, we devise a tailored baseline for dense crowds location, detection, and counting from a new perspective, named as LDC-Net for convenience, which has the following features: 1) A strong but minimalist paradigm to detect objects by only predicting a location map and a size map, which endows an ability to detect in a scene with any capacity ($0 \sim 10,000+$ persons); 2) Excellent cross-scale ability in facing a large variation, such as the head ranging in $0 \sim 100,000+$ pixels; 3) Achieve superior performance in location and box prediction tasks, as well as a competitive counting performance compared with the density-based methods. Finally, the source code and pre-trained models will be released.
The performance of optical flow algorithms greatly depends on the specifics of the content and the application for which it is used. Existing and well established optical flow datasets are limited to rather particular contents from which none is close to crowd behavior analysis; whereas such applications heavily utilize optical flow. We introduce a new optical flow dataset exploiting the possibilities of a recent video engine to generate sequences with ground-truth optical flow for large crowds in different scenarios. We break with the development of the last decade of introducing ever increasing displacements to pose new difficulties. Instead we focus on real-world surveillance scenarios where numerous small, partly independent, non rigidly moving objects observed over a long temporal range pose a challenge. By evaluating different optical flow algorithms, we find that results of established datasets can not be transferred to these new challenges. In exhaustive experiments we are able to provide new insight into optical flow for crowd analysis. Finally, the results have been validated on the real-world UCF crowd tracking benchmark while achieving competitive results compared to more sophisticated state-of-the-art crowd tracking approaches.
With multiple crowd gatherings of millions of people every year in events ranging from pilgrimages to protests, concerts to marathons, and festivals to funerals; visual crowd analysis is emerging as a new frontier in computer vision. In particular, counting in highly dense crowds is a challenging problem with far-reaching applicability in crowd safety and management, as well as gauging political significance of protests and demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that simultaneously solves the problems of counting, density map estimation and localization of people in a given dense crowd image. Our formulation is based on an important observation that the three problems are inherently related to each other making the loss function for optimizing a deep CNN decomposable. Since localization requires high-quality images and annotations, we introduce UCF-QNRF dataset that overcomes the shortcomings of previous datasets, and contains 1.25 million humans manually marked with dot annotations. Finally, we present evaluation measures and comparison with recent deep CNN networks, including those developed specifically for crowd counting. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art on the new dataset, which is the most challenging dataset with the largest number of crowd annotations in the most diverse set of scenes.