Dense Crowds Detection and Surveillance with Drones using Density Maps

Abstract: Detecting and Counting people in a human crowd from a moving drone present challenging problems that arisefrom the constant changing in the image perspective andcamera angle. In this paper, we test two different state-of-the-art approaches, density map generation with VGG19 trainedwith the Bayes loss function and detect-then-count with FasterRCNN with ResNet50-FPN as backbone, in order to comparetheir precision for counting and detecting people in differentreal scenarios taken from a drone flight. We show empiricallythat both proposed methodologies perform especially well fordetecting and counting people in sparse crowds when thedrone is near the ground. Nevertheless, VGG19 provides betterprecision on both tasks while also being lighter than FasterRCNN. Furthermore, VGG19 outperforms Faster RCNN whendealing with dense crowds, proving to be more robust toscale variations and strong occlusions, being more suitable forsurveillance applications using drones