Papers › Single-Image Crowd Counting via Multi-Column Convolutional Neural Network
Single-Image Crowd Counting via Multi-Column Convolutional Neural Network
Yingying Zhang, Desen Zhou, Siqin Chen, Shenghua Gao, Yi Ma
This paper aims to develop a method than can accurately estimate the crowd count from an individual image with arbitrary crowd density and arbitrary perspective. To this end, we have proposed a simple but effective Multi-column Convolutional Neural Network (MCNN) architecture to map the image to its crowd density map. The proposed MCNN allows the input image to be of arbitrary size or resolution. By utilizing filters with receptive fields of different sizes, the features learned by each column CNN are adaptive to variations in people/head size due to perspective effect or image resolution. Furthermore, the true density map is computed accurately based on geometry-adaptive kernels which do not need knowing the perspective map of the input image. Since exiting crowd counting datasets do not adequately cover all the challenging situations considered in our work, we have collected and labelled a large new dataset that includes 1198 images with about 330,000 heads annotated. On this challenging new dataset, as well as all existing datasets, we conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and method. In particular, with the proposed simple MCNN model, our method outperforms all existing methods. In addition, experiments show that our model, once trained on one dataset, can be readily transferred to a new dataset.
Code
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Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crowd Counting | ShanghaiTech A | MCNN | MAE | 110.2 | #34 of 35 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Crowd Counting | ShanghaiTech B | MCNN | MAE | 26.4 | #31 of 32 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Crowd Counting | UCF CC 50 | MCNN | MAE | 377.6 | #20 of 22 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Crowd Counting | UCF-QNRF | MCNN | MAE | 277 | #22 of 23 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Crowd Counting | Venice | MCNN | MAE | 145.4 | #5 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Crowd Counting | WorldExpo’10 | MCNN | Average MAE | 11.6 | #14 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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