Crowd Counting with Density Adaption Networks

Crowd counting is one of the core tasks in various surveillance applications. A practical system involves estimating accurate head counts in dynamic scenarios under different lightning, camera perspective and occlusion states. Previous approaches estimate head counts despite that they can vary dramatically in different density settings; the crowd is often unevenly distributed and the results are therefore unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a lightweight deep learning framework that can automatically estimate the crowd density level and adaptively choose between different counter networks that are explicitly trained for different density domains. Experiments on two recent crowd counting datasets, UCF_CC_50 and ShanghaiTech, show that the proposed mechanism achieves promising improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, runtime speed is 20 FPS on a single GPU.

Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposals

This paper introduces a novel rotation-based framework for arbitrary-oriented text detection in natural scene images. We present the Rotation Region Proposal Networks (RRPN), which are designed to generate inclined proposals with text orientation angle information. The angle information is then adapted for bounding box regression to make the proposals more accurately fit into the text region in terms of the orientation. The Rotation Region-of-Interest (RRoI) pooling layer is proposed to project arbitrary-oriented proposals to a feature map for a text region classifier. The whole framework is built upon a region-proposal-based architecture, which ensures the computational efficiency of the arbitrary-oriented text detection compared with previous text detection systems. We conduct experiments using the rotation-based framework on three real-world scene text detection datasets and demonstrate its superiority in terms of effectiveness and efficiency over previous approaches.