Multi-Scale Guided Attention Network for Crowd Counting

The CNN-based crowd counting method uses image pyramid and dense connection to fuse features to solve the problems of multiscale and information loss. However, these operations lead to information redundancy and confusion between crowd and background information. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale guided attention network (MGANet) to solve the above problems. Specifically, the multilayer features of the network are fused by a top-down approach to obtain multiscale information and context information. The attention mechanism is used to guide the acquired features of each layer in space and channel so that the network pays more attention to the crowd in the image, ignores irrelevant information, and further integrates to obtain the final high-quality density map. Besides, we propose a counting loss function combining SSIM Loss, MAE Loss, and MSE Loss to achieve effective network convergence. We experiment on four major datasets and obtain good results. The effectiveness of the network modules is proved by the corresponding ablation experiments. The source code is available at https://github.com/ lpfworld/MGANet.