Enhanced YOLOv8-Based Model with Context Enrichment Module for Crowd Counting in Complex Drone Imagery

Crowd counting in aerial images presents unique challenges due to varying altitudes, angles, and cluttered backgrounds. Additionally, the small size of targets, often occupying only a few pixels in high-resolution images, further complicates the problem. Current crowd counting models struggle in these complex scenarios, leading to inaccurate counts, which are crucial for crowd management. Moreover, these regression-based models only provide the total count without indicating the location or distribution of people within the environment, limiting their practical utility. While YOLOv8 has achieved significant success in detecting small targets within aerial imagery, it faces challenges when directly applied to crowd counting tasks in such contexts. To overcome these challenges, we propose an improved framework based on YOLOv8, incorporating a context enrichment module (CEM) to capture multiscale contextual information. This enhancement improves the model’s ability to detect and localize tiny targets in complex aerial images. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed framework on the challenging VisDrone-CC2021 dataset, and our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.