MPANet: Multi-level Progressive Aggregation Network for Crowd Counting

Crowd counting has important applications in many fileds, but it is still a challenging task due to background occlusion, scale variation and uneven distribution of crowd. This paper proposes the Multi-level Progressive Aggregation Network (MPANet) to enhance the channel and spatial dependencies of feature maps and effectively integrate the multi-level features. Besides, the Aggregation Refinement (AR) module is designed to integrate low-level spatial information and high-level semantic information. The proposed AR module can effectively utilize the complementary properties between multi-level features to generate high-quality density maps. Moreover, the Multi-scale Aware (MA) module is constructed to capture rich contextual information through convolutional kernels of different sizes. Furthermore, the Semantic Attention (SA) module is designed to enhance spatial and channel response on feature maps, which can reduce false recognition of the background region. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms most state-of-the-art methods.