EHNet: An Efficient Hybrid Network for Crowd Counting and Localization

Abstract

In recent years, crowd counting and localization have become crucial techniques in computer vision, with applications spanning various domains. The presence of multi-scale crowd distributions within a single image remains a fundamental challenge in crowd counting tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Efficient Hybrid Network (EHNet), a novel framework for efficient crowd counting and localization. By reformulating crowd counting into a point regression framework, EHNet leverages the Spatial-Position Attention Module (SPAM) to capture comprehensive spatial contexts and long-range dependencies. Additionally, we develop an Adaptive Feature Aggregation Module (AFAM) to effectively fuse and harmonize multi-scale feature representations. Building upon these, we introduce the Multi-Scale Attentive Decoder (MSAD). Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that EHNet achieves competitive performance with reduced computational overhead, outperforming existing methods on ShanghaiTech Part \_A, ShanghaiTech Part \_B, UCF-CC-50, and UCF-QNRF. Our code is in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EHNet.