AI RESEARCH
Thermal-Only Crowd Counting with Deployment-Time Privacy Protection
arXiv CS.CV
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ArXi:2605.17042v1 Announce Type: new While RGB-Thermal crowd counting has shown promise, the paradigm faces critical limitations: RGB data raises privacy concerns in public surveillance, and multi-modal misalignment degrades fusion performance. We propose the first thermal-only framework specifically designed for privacy-conscious crowd counting, eliminating RGB dependency at inference time and substantially reducing the privacy exposure associated with continuous RGB capture in public surveillance deployments.