Inception-Based Crowd Counting -- Being Fast while Remaining Accurate

Recent sophisticated CNN-based algorithms have demonstrated their extraordinary ability to automate counting crowds from images, thanks to their structures which are designed to address the issue of various head scales. However, these complicated architectures also increase computational complexity enormously, making real-time estimation implausible. Thus, in this paper, a new method, based on Inception-V3, is proposed to reduce the amount of computation. This proposed approach (ICC), exploits the first five inception blocks and the contextual module designed in CAN to extract features at different receptive fields, thereby being context-aware. The employment of these two different strategies can also increase the model's robustness. Experiments show that ICC can at best reduce 85.3 percent calculations with 24.4 percent performance loss. This high efficiency contributes significantly to the deployment of crowd counting models in surveillance systems to guard the public safety. The code will be available at https://github.com/YIMINGMA/CrowdCounting-ICC,and its pre-trained weights on the Crowd Counting dataset, which comprises a large variety of scenes from surveillance perspectives, will also open-sourced.