Congested crowd instance localization with dilated convolutional swin transformer

Crowd localization is a new computer vision task, evolved from crowd counting. Different from the latter, it provides more precise location information for each instance, not just counting numbers for the whole crowd scene, which brings greater challenges, especially in extremely congested crowd scenes. In this paper, we focus on how to achieve precise instance localization in high-density crowd scenes, and to alleviate the problem that the feature extraction ability of the traditional model is reduced due to the target occlusion, the image blur, etc. To this end, we propose a Dilated Convolutional Swin Transformer (DCST) for congested crowd scenes. Specifically, a window-based vision transformer is introduced into the crowd localization task, which effectively improves the capacity of representation learning. Then, the well-designed dilated convolutional module is inserted into some different stages of the transformer to enhance the large-range contextual information. Extensive experiments evidence the effectiveness of the proposed methods and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on five popular datasets. Especially, the proposed model achieves F1-measure of 77.5% and MAE of 84.2 in terms of localization and counting performance, respectively.