Evaluating Supervision Levels Trade-Offs for Infrared-Based People Counting

Object detection models are commonly used for people counting (and localization) in many applications but require a dataset with costly bounding box annotations for training. Given the importance of privacy in people counting, these models rely more and more on infrared images, making the task even harder. In this paper, we explore how weaker levels of supervision affect the performance of deep person counting architectures for image classification and point-level localization. Our experiments indicate that counting people using a convolutional neural network with image-level annotation achieves a level of accuracy that is competitive with YOLO detectors and point-level localization models yet provides a higher frame rate and a simi-lar amount of model parameters. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tortueTortue/IRPeopleCounting.