  Crowd counting, i.e., estimating the number of people in a crowded area, has
attracted much interest in the research community. Although many attempts have
been reported, crowd counting remains an open real-world problem due to the
vast scale variations in crowd density within the interested area, and severe
occlusion among the crowd. In this paper, we propose a novel Pyramid
Density-Aware Attention-based network, abbreviated as PDANet, that leverages
the attention, pyramid scale feature and two branch decoder modules for
density-aware crowd counting. The PDANet utilizes these modules to extract
different scale features, focus on the relevant information, and suppress the
misleading ones. We also address the variation of crowdedness levels among
different images with an exclusive Density-Aware Decoder (DAD). For this
purpose, a classifier evaluates the density level of the input features and
then passes them to the corresponding high and low crowded DAD modules.
Finally, we generate an overall density map by considering the summation of low
and high crowded density maps as spatial attention. Meanwhile, we employ two
losses to create a precise density map for the input scene. Extensive
evaluations conducted on the challenging benchmark datasets well demonstrate
the superior performance of the proposed PDANet in terms of the accuracy of
counting and generated density maps over the well-known state of the arts.
