CAGNet: coordinated attention guidance network for RGB-T crowd counting

Abstract

Estimating crowd density is a demanding task that has garnered significant research attention in urban planning, intelligent transportation, and other related fields. This study utilizes RGB and thermal images to leverage multimodal information and introduces a coordinated attention guidance network (CAGNet) for RGB-thermal (RGB-T) crowd counting. The framework enhances the expressive capabilities of backbone features by incorporating overall and local relationships through the information enhancement unit module, which utilizes the context coordination perception module for horizontal information mining, interactively compensating for the continuity of spatial information. Subsequently, it utilizes diverse multi-level information features for hierarchical intersection and progression, resulting in an accurate crowd counting density map. Experimental results on the RGBT-CC benchmark dataset demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of CAGNet for RGB-T crowd counting. Furthermore, the proposed CAGNet can be extended to crowd density estimation and has achieved high performance on the ShanghaiTechRGBD and DroneRGBT datasets. The former dataset comprises paired RGB images and depth maps. The code and model for this research are available at https://github.com/WBangG/CAGNet.