  In this paper, we develop deep spatio-temporal neural networks to
sequentially count vehicles from low quality videos captured by city cameras
(citycams). Citycam videos have low resolution, low frame rate, high occlusion
and large perspective, making most existing methods lose their efficacy. To
overcome limitations of existing methods and incorporate the temporal
information of traffic video, we design a novel FCN-rLSTM network to jointly
estimate vehicle density and vehicle count by connecting fully convolutional
neural networks (FCN) with long short term memory networks (LSTM) in a residual
learning fashion. Such design leverages the strengths of FCN for pixel-level
prediction and the strengths of LSTM for learning complex temporal dynamics.
The residual learning connection reformulates the vehicle count regression as
learning residual functions with reference to the sum of densities in each
frame, which significantly accelerates the training of networks. To preserve
feature map resolution, we propose a Hyper-Atrous combination to integrate
atrous convolution in FCN and combine feature maps of different convolution
layers. FCN-rLSTM enables refined feature representation and a novel end-to-end
trainable mapping from pixels to vehicle count. We extensively evaluated the
proposed method on different counting tasks with three datasets, with
experimental results demonstrating their effectiveness and robustness. In
particular, FCN-rLSTM reduces the mean absolute error (MAE) from 5.31 to 4.21
on TRANCOS, and reduces the MAE from 2.74 to 1.53 on WebCamT. Training process
is accelerated by 5 times on average.
