Crowd scene analysis receives growing attention due to its wide applications. Grasping the accurate crowd location (rather than merely crowd count) is important for spatially identifying high-risk regions in congested scenes. In this paper, we propose a Compressed Sensing based Output Encoding (CSOE) scheme, which casts detecting pixel coordinates of small objects into a task of signal regression in encoding signal space. CSOE helps to boost localization performance in circumstances where targets are highly crowded without huge scale variation. In addition, proper receptive field sizes are crucial for crowd analysis due to human size variations. We create Multiple Dilated Convolution Branches (MDCB) that offers a set of different receptive field sizes, to improve localization accuracy when objects sizes change drastically in an image. Also, we develop an Adaptive Receptive Field Weighting (ARFW) module, which further deals with scale variation issue by adaptively emphasizing informative channels that have proper receptive field size. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art performance across four mainstream datasets, especially achieves excellent results in highly crowded scenes. More importantly, experiments support our insights that it is crucial to tackle target size variation issue in crowd analysis task, and casting crowd localization as regression in encoding signal space is quite effective for crowd analysis.
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