Information Entropy Augmented High Density Crowd Counting Network

• Published in: International journal on semantic web and information systems Vol. 18; no. 1; pp. 1 - 15
• Main Authors: Hao, Yu, Wang, Lingzhe, Liu, Ying, Fan, Jiulun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hershey IGI Global 01.01.2022
• Subjects: Crowd monitoring; Density; Entropy; Entropy (Information theory); Feature extraction; China
• ISSN: 1552-6283; 1552-6291
• DOI: 10.4018/IJSWIS.297144

The research proposes an innovated structure of the density map-based crowd counting network augmented by information entropy. The network comprises of a front-end network to extract features and a back-end network to generate density maps. In order to validate the assumption that the entropy can boost the accuracy of density map generation, a multi-scale entropy map extraction process is imported into the front-end network along with a fine-tuned convolutional feature extraction process, In the back-end network, extracted features are decoded into the density map with a multi-column dilated convolution network. Finally, the decoded density map can be mapped as the estimated counting number. Experimental results indicate that the devised network is capable of accurately estimating the count in extremely high crowd density. Compared to similar structured networks which don’t adapt entropy feature, the proposed network exhibits higher performance. This result proves the feature of information entropy is capable of enhancing the efficiency of density map-based crowd counting approaches.