人群计数：第一篇引入CNN的论文：Fast crowd density estimation with convolutional neural networks

**

Goal:

**
The existing methods are hard to satisfy the accuracy and speed requirment, we propose to estimate crowd density by an optimized convolutional neural network (ConvNet).

**

Contribution:

**

1. ConvNet is the first introduced for crowd density estimation.

2. A cascade of two ConvNet classifier has been designed, which improves both of the accuracy and speed.

**

Structure:

**
The goal of the CNN is dividing the image into different density level.

More details about this work:
a) The structure of multi-stage convolutional network is optimized by integrating similar feature maps, so as to decrease the computation cost and accelerate the speed of both training and detection stages.

b) Inspired by the boosting algorithm, a cascade of two classifiers is also designed. The first one picks out samples which are obviously misclassified, and the second one, which is trained especially for hard samples, will reclassify those rejected samples. By this strategy, the accuracy is improved after handling hard samples more precisely.

c) Moving away similar feature maps from the 2nd stage together with their connections. A lighter network is obtained and the computation burden is significantly reduced. Additionally, the boosting ideology is applied into training and a cascade classifier with two optimized ConvNets is also constructed.