TinyCount: an efficient crowd counting network for intelligent surveillance

Crowd counting, the task of estimating the total number of people in an image, is essential for intelligent surveillance. Integrating a well-trained crowd counting network into edge devices, such as intelligent CCTV systems, enables its application across various domains, including the prevention of crowd collapses and urban planning. For a model to be embedded in edge devices, it requires robust performance, reduced parameter count, and faster response times. This study proposes a lightweight and powerful model called TinyCount, which has only 60k parameters. The proposed TinyCount is a fully convolutional network consisting of a feature extract module (FEM) for robust and rapid feature extraction, a scale perception module (SPM) for scale variation perception and an upsampling module (UM) that adjusts the feature map to the same size as the original image. TinyCount demonstrated competitive performance across three representative crowd counting datasets, despite utilizing approximately 3.33 to 271 times fewer parameters than other crowd counting approaches. The proposed model achieved relatively fast inference times by leveraging the MobileNetV2 architecture with dilated and transposed convolutions. The application of SEblock and findings from existing studies further proved its effectiveness. Finally, we evaluated the proposed TinyCount on multiple edge devices, including the Raspberry Pi 4, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, to demonstrate its potential for practical applications.