We are interested in counting the number of instances of object classes in natural, everyday images. Previous counting approaches tackle the problem in restricted domains such as counting pedestrians in surveillance videos. Counts can also be estimated from outputs of other vision tasks like object detection. In this work, we build dedicated models for counting designed to tackle the large variance in counts, appearances, and scales of objects found in natural scenes. Our approach is inspired by the phenomenon of subitizing - the ability of humans to make quick assessments of counts given a perceptual signal, for small count values. Given a natural scene, we employ a divide and conquer strategy while incorporating context across the scene to adapt the subitizing idea to counting. Our approach offers consistent improvements over numerous baseline approaches for counting on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO datasets. Subsequently, we study how counting can be used to improve object detection. We then show a proof of concept application of our counting methods to the task of Visual Question Answering, by studying the `how many?' questions in the VQA and COCO-QA datasets.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）；Benha University（班哈大学）；Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology（埃及日本科学技术大学）；Alexandria University（亚历山大大学）
This paper describes a dataset containing small images of text from everyday scenes. The purpose of the dataset is to support the development of new automated systems that can detect and analyze text. Although much research has been devoted to text detection and recognition in scanned documents, relatively little attention has been given to text detection in other types of images, such as photographs that are posted on social-media sites. This new dataset, known as COCO-Text-Patch, contains approximately 354,000 small images that are each labeled as "text" or "non-text". This dataset particula…
University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Huawei Technologies Canada（华为加拿大公司）
We address the problem of image-based crowd counting. In particular, we propose a new problem called unlabeled scene-adaptive crowd counting. Given a new target scene, we would like to have a crowd counting model specifically adapted to this particular scene based on the target data that capture some information about the new scene. In this paper, we propose to use one or more unlabeled images from the target scene to perform the adaptation. In comparison with the existing problem setups (e.g. fully supervised), our proposed problem setup is closer to the real-world applications of crowd count…
We consider the problem of few-shot scene adaptive crowd counting. Given a target camera scene, our goal is to adapt a model to this specific scene with only a few labeled images of that scene. The solution to this problem has potential applications in numerous real-world scenarios, where we ideally like to deploy a crowd counting model specially adapted to a target camera. We accomplish this challenge by taking inspiration from the recently introduced learning-to-learn paradigm in the context of few-shot regime. In training, our method learns the model parameters in a way that facilitates the…
Crowd counting in single-view images has achieved outstanding performance on existing counting datasets. However, single-view counting is not applicable to large and wide scenes (e.g., public parks, long subway platforms, or event spaces) because a single camera cannot capture the whole scene in adequate detail for counting, e.g., when the scene is too large to fit into the field-of-view of the camera, too long so that the resolution is too low on faraway crowds, or when there are too many large objects that occlude large portions of the crowd. Therefore, to solve the wide-area counting task r…
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is of tremendous interest to the research community with important applications such as aiding visually impaired users and image-based search. In this work, we explore the use of scene graphs for solving the VQA task. We conduct experiments on the GQA dataset which presents a challenging set of questions requiring counting, compositionality and advanced reasoning capability, and provides scene graphs for a large number of images. We adopt image + question architectures for use with scene graphs, evaluate various scene graph generation techniques for unseen image…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Multi-view crowd counting has been previously proposed to utilize multi-cameras to extend the field-of-view of a single camera, capturing more people in the scene, and improve counting performance for occluded people or those in low resolution. However, the current multi-view paradigm trains and tests on the same single scene and camera-views, which limits its practical application. In this paper, we propose a cross-view cross-scene (CVCS) multi-view crowd counting paradigm, where the training and testing occur on different scenes with arbitrary camera layouts. To dynamically handle the challe…
Aimetis Corp.（艾梅蒂斯公司）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
The problem of automated crowd segmentation and counting has garnered significant interest in the field of video surveillance. This paper proposes a novel scene invariant crowd segmentation and counting algorithm designed with high accuracy yet low computational complexity in mind, which is key for widespread industrial adoption. A novel low-complexity, scale-normalized feature called Histogram of Moving Gradients (HoMG) is introduced for highly effective spatiotemporal representation of individuals and crowds within a video. Real-time crowd segmentation is achieved via boosted cascade of weak…
In this paper we advance the state-of-the-art for crowd counting in high density scenes by further exploring the idea of a fully convolutional crowd counting model introduced by (Zhang et al., 2016). Producing an accurate and robust crowd count estimator using computer vision techniques has attracted significant research interest in recent years. Applications for crowd counting systems exist in many diverse areas including city planning, retail, and of course general public safety. Developing a highly generalised counting model that can be deployed in any surveillance scenario with any camera …
Vision-based automatic counting of people has widespread applications in intelligent transportation systems, security, and logistics. However, there is currently no large-scale public dataset for benchmarking approaches on this problem. This work fills this gap by introducing the first real-world RGB-D People Counting DataSet (PCDS) containing over 4,500 videos recorded at the entrance doors of buses in normal and cluttered conditions. It also proposes an efficient method for counting people in real-world cluttered scenes related to public transportations using depth videos. The proposed metho…
In recent years, significant progress has been made on the research of crowd counting. However, as the challenging scale variations and complex scenes existed in crowds, neither traditional convolution networks nor recent Transformer architectures with fixed-size attention could handle the task well. To address this problem, this paper proposes a scene-adaptive attention network, termed SAANet. First of all, we design a deformable attention in-built Transformer backbone, which learns adaptive feature representations with deformable sampling locations and dynamic attention weights. Then we prop…
Federal University of Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）；Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná（巴拉那天主教大学）；École de Technologie Supérieure（高等技术学院）
This paper presents two novel approaches for people counting in crowded and open environments that combine the information gathered by multiple views. Multiple camera are used to expand the field of view as well as to mitigate the problem of occlusion that commonly affects the performance of counting methods using single cameras. The first approach is regarded as a direct approach and it attempts to segment and count each individual in the crowd. For such an aim, two head detectors trained with head images are employed: one based on support vector machines and another based on Adaboost percept…
One-Shot Crowd Counting With Density Guidance For Scene Adaptation
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Intelligent Weather Forecasting and Applications Based on Big Data（江苏大数据智能天气预报与应用重点实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Climate System Prediction and Risk Management (CPRM)（气候变化预测与风险管理国家重点实验室）；ICAR/CIC-FEMD/KLME/ILCEC；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics, Northwestern Polytechnical University（人工智能、光学与电子学学院，西北工业大学）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Zhengzhou University（郑州大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
It is important to monitor and analyze crowd events for the sake of city safety. In an EDOF (extended depth of field) image with a crowded scene, the distribution of people is highly imbalanced. People far away from the camera look much smaller and often occlude each other heavily, while people close to the camera look larger. In such a case, it is difficult to accurately estimate the number of people by using one technique. In this paper, we propose a Depth Information Guided Crowd Counting (DigCrowd) method to deal with crowded EDOF scenes. DigCrowd first uses the depth information of an ima…
We position a narrative-centred computational model for high-level knowledge representation and reasoning in the context of a range of assistive technologies concerned with "visuo-spatial perception and cognition" tasks. Our proposed narrative model encompasses aspects such as \emph{space, events, actions, change, and interaction} from the viewpoint of commonsense reasoning and learning in large-scale cognitive systems. The broad focus of this paper is on the domain of "human-activity interpretation" in smart environments, ambient intelligence etc. In the backdrop of a "smart meeting cinematog…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
The problem of counting crowds in varying density scenes or in different density regions of the same scene, named as pan-density crowd counting, is highly challenging. Previous methods are designed for single density scenes or do not fully utilize pan-density information. We propose a novel framework, the Pan-Density Network (PaDNet), for pan-density crowd counting. In order to effectively capture pan-density information, PaDNet has a novel module, the Density-Aware Network (DAN), that contains multiple sub-networks pretrained on scenarios with different densities. Further, a module named the …
RGB-D Indiscernible Object Counting in Underwater Scenes
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学先锋人工智能中心）；School of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）
L2HCount:Generalizing Crowd Counting from Low to High Crowd Density via Density Simulation
School of Intelligent Engineering and Automation, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学智能工程与自动化学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）
Getting the Numbers Right$\unicode{x2014}$Modelling Multi-Class Object Counting in Dense and Varied Scenes
2 Interdisciplinary Institute, University of Aberdeen, UK \& UiT The Arctic University of Norway；3 Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands；1 L-CAS, University of Lincoln, UK；4 AVAIL, University of Lincoln, UK
State-of-the-art multi-object tracking~(MOT) methods follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, where object trajectories are obtained by associating per-frame outputs of object detectors. In crowded scenes, however, detectors often fail to obtain accurate detections due to heavy occlusions and high crowd density. In this paper, we propose a new MOT paradigm, tracking-by-counting, tailored for crowded scenes. Using crowd density maps, we jointly model detection, counting, and tracking of multiple targets as a network flow program, which simultaneously finds the global optimal detections and tr…
Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Generic object counting in natural scenes is a challenging computer vision problem. Existing approaches either rely on instance-level supervision or absolute count information to train a generic object counter. We introduce a partially supervised setting that significantly reduces the supervision level required for generic object counting. We propose two novel frameworks, named lower-count (LC) and reduced lower-count (RLC), to enable object counting under this setting. Our frameworks are built on a novel dual-branch architecture that has an image classification and a density branch. Our LC fr…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Accurate pedestrian counting algorithm is critical to eliminate insecurity in the congested public scenes. However, counting pedestrians in crowded scenes often suffer from severe perspective distortion. In this paper, basing on the straight-line double region pedestrian counting method, we propose a dynamic region division algorithm to keep the completeness of counting objects. Utilizing the object bounding boxes obtained by YoloV3 and expectation division line of the scene, the boundary for nearby region and distant one is generated under the premise of retaining whole head. Ulteriorly, appr…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
State-of-the-art methods for counting people in crowded scenes rely on deep networks to estimate crowd density. While effective, deep learning approaches are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which, in a crowd-counting context, can lead to serious security issues. However, attack and defense mechanisms have been virtually unexplored in regression tasks, let alone for crowd density estimation. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of existing attack strategies on crowd-counting networks, and introduce a simple yet effective pixel-wise detection mechanism. It builds on the intuition t…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；MICC, University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学MICC）
We propose a novel crowd counting approach that leverages abundantly available unlabeled crowd imagery in a learning-to-rank framework. To induce a ranking of cropped images , we use the observation that any sub-image of a crowded scene image is guaranteed to contain the same number or fewer persons than the super-image. This allows us to address the problem of limited size of existing datasets for crowd counting. We collect two crowd scene datasets from Google using keyword searches and query-by-example image retrieval, respectively. We demonstrate how to efficiently learn from these unlabele…
We propose a novel crowd counting model that maps a given crowd scene to its density. Crowd analysis is compounded by myriad of factors like inter-occlusion between people due to extreme crowding, high similarity of appearance between people and background elements, and large variability of camera view-points. Current state-of-the art approaches tackle these factors by using multi-scale CNN architectures, recurrent networks and late fusion of features from multi-column CNN with different receptive fields. We propose switching convolutional neural network that leverages variation of crowd densi…
One of appealing approaches to guiding learnable parameter optimization, such as feature maps, is global attention, which enlightens network intelligence at a fraction of the cost. However, its loss calculation process still falls short: 1)We can only produce one-dimensional 'pseudo labels' for attention, since the artificial threshold involved in the procedure is not robust; 2) The attention awaiting loss calculation is necessarily high-dimensional, and decreasing it by convolution will inevitably introduce additional learnable parameters, thus confusing the source of the loss. To this end, w…
Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC), Qatar University（卡塔尔移动创新中心（QMIC），卡塔尔大学）
Crowd management technologies that leverage computer vision are widespread in contemporary times. There exists many security-related applications of these methods, including, but not limited to: following the flow of an array of people and monitoring large gatherings. In this paper, we propose an accurate monitoring system composed of two concatenated convolutional deep learning architectures. The first part called Front-end, is responsible for converting bi-dimensional signals and delivering high-level features. The second part, called the Back-end, is a dilated Convolutional Neural Network (…
Joint Counting, Detection and Re-Identification for Multi-Object Tracking
Shenzhen Duorou Intelligent System Co., Ltd.（深圳多柔智能系统有限公司）；School of Electrical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学电气工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所机器人国家重点实验室）
University of Twente（屯特大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
The visual world we sense, interpret and interact everyday is a complex composition of interleaved physical entities. Therefore, it is a very challenging task to generate vivid scenes of similar complexity using computers. In this work, we present a scene generation framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to sequentially compose a scene, breaking down the underlying problem into smaller ones. Different than the existing approaches, our framework offers an explicit control over the elements of a scene through separate background and foreground generators. Starting with an init…
Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University at Albany, SUNY（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）；JD Digits（京东数科）
Object detection and counting are related but challenging problems, especially for drone based scenes with small objects and cluttered background. In this paper, we propose a new Guided Attention Network (GANet) to deal with both object detection and counting tasks based on the feature pyramid. Different from the previous methods relying on unsupervised attention modules, we fuse different scales of feature maps by using the proposed weakly-supervised Background Attention (BA) between the background and objects for more semantic feature representation. Then, the Foreground Attention (FA) modul…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Element AI
Object counting is an important task in computer vision due to its growing demand in applications such as surveillance, traffic monitoring, and counting everyday objects. State-of-the-art methods use regression-based optimization where they explicitly learn to count the objects of interest. These often perform better than detection-based methods that need to learn the more difficult task of predicting the location, size, and shape of each object. However, we propose a detection-based method that does not need to estimate the size and shape of the objects and that outperforms regression-based m…
Depth-Guided Video Object Counting in Crowded Scenes
Harbin Institute of Technology (Weihai)（哈尔滨工业大学（威海））；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology Qingdao Research Institute（哈尔滨工业大学青岛研究院）
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Illinois State University（伊利诺伊州立大学）
We demonstrate a compressed sensing, photon counting lidar system based on the single-pixel camera. Our technique recovers both depth and intensity maps from a single under-sampled set of incoherent, linear projections of a scene of interest at ultra-low light levels around 0.5 picowatts. Only two-dimensional reconstructions are required to image a three-dimensional scene. We demonstrate intensity imaging and depth mapping at 256 x 256 pixel transverse resolution with acquisition times as short as 3 seconds. We also show novelty filtering, reconstructing only the difference between two instanc…
'Actions' play a vital role in how humans interact with the world. Thus, autonomous agents that would assist us in everyday tasks also require the capability to perform 'Reasoning about Actions & Change' (RAC). Recently, there has been growing interest in the study of RAC with visual and linguistic inputs. Graphs are often used to represent semantic structure of the visual content (i.e. objects, their attributes and relationships among objects), commonly referred to as scene-graphs. In this work, we propose a novel method that leverages scene-graph representation of images to reason about the …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
In real-world crowd counting applications, the crowd densities vary greatly in spatial and temporal domains. A detection based counting method will estimate crowds accurately in low density scenes, while its reliability in congested areas is downgraded. A regression based approach, on the other hand, captures the general density information in crowded regions. Without knowing the location of each person, it tends to overestimate the count in low density areas. Thus, exclusively using either one of them is not sufficient to handle all kinds of scenes with varying densities. To address this issu…
Estimating count and density maps from crowd images has a wide range of applications such as video surveillance, traffic monitoring, public safety and urban planning. In addition, techniques developed for crowd counting can be applied to related tasks in other fields of study such as cell microscopy, vehicle counting and environmental survey. The task of crowd counting and density map estimation is riddled with many challenges such as occlusions, non-uniform density, intra-scene and inter-scene variations in scale and perspective. Nevertheless, over the last few years, crowd count analysis has…
Academy of Advanced Interdisciplinary Research, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学先进交叉研究院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能、光学与电子学院（iOPEN））；Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学智能感知与图像理解教育部重点实验室、智能感知与计算国际研究中心）
Crowd localization is a new computer vision task, evolved from crowd counting. Different from the latter, it provides more precise location information for each instance, not just counting numbers for the whole crowd scene, which brings greater challenges, especially in extremely congested crowd scenes. In this paper, we focus on how to achieve precise instance localization in high-density crowd scenes, and to alleviate the problem that the feature extraction ability of the traditional model is reduced due to the target occlusion, the image blur, etc. To this end, we propose a Dilated Convolut…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
Crowd counting, for estimating the number of people in a crowd using vision-based computer techniques, has attracted much interest in the research community. Although many attempts have been reported, real-world problems, such as huge variation in subjects' sizes in images and serious occlusion among people, make it still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Counting Convolutional Neural Network (A-CCNN) and consider the scale variation of objects in a frame adaptively so as to improve the accuracy of counting. Our method takes advantages of contextual information to pr…
Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Text recognition is a popular topic for its broad applications. In this work, we excavate the implicit task, character counting within the traditional text recognition, without additional labor annotation cost. The implicit task plays as an auxiliary branch for complementing the sequential recognition. We design a two-branch reciprocal feature learning framework in order to adequately utilize the features from both the tasks. Through exploiting the complementary effect between explicit and implicit tasks, the feature is reliably enhanced. Extensive experiments on 7 benchmarks show the advantag…
Synthesizing 3D human avatars interacting realistically with a scene is an important problem with applications in AR/VR, video games and robotics. Towards this goal, we address the task of generating a virtual human -- hands and full body -- grasping everyday objects. Existing methods approach this problem by collecting a 3D dataset of humans interacting with objects and training on this data. However, 1) these methods do not generalize to different object positions and orientations, or to the presence of furniture in the scene, and 2) the diversity of their generated full-body poses is very l…
Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAV) are a promising technology for smart farming related applications. Aerial monitoring of agriculture farms with UAV enables key decision-making pertaining to crop monitoring. Advancements in deep learning techniques have further enhanced the precision and reliability of aerial imagery based analysis. The capabilities to mount various kinds of sensors (RGB, spectral cameras) on UAV allows remote crop analysis applications such as vegetation classification and segmentation, crop counting, yield monitoring and prediction, crop mapping, weed detection, disease and nut…
TasselNetV4: A vision foundation model for cross-scene, cross-scale, and cross-species plant counting
National Key Laboratory of Multispectral Information Intelligent Processing Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation（multispectral information intelligent processing technology, school of artificial intelligence and automation）；China-Poland Joint Laboratory on Measurement and Control Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation；School of Cyber Science and Engineering；School of Computer Science and Engineering；Wuhan Institute of Technology；Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences；Engineering Research Center of Plant Phenotyping, Ministry of Education, Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Modern Crop Production, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Object counting aims to estimate the number of objects in images. The leading counting approaches focus on the single category counting task and achieve impressive performance. Note that there are multiple categories of objects in real scenes. Multi-class object counting expands the scope of application of object counting task. The multi-target detection task can achieve multi-class object counting in some scenarios. However, it requires the dataset annotated with bounding boxes. Compared with the point annotations in mainstream object counting issues, the coordinate box-level annotations are …
Does it Really Count? Assessing Semantic Grounding in Text-Guided Class-Agnostic Counting
Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the National Research Council (ISTI-CNR)（意大利国家研究理事会信息科学与技术研究所）；University of Pisa - Department of Information Engineering（比萨大学信息工程系）
We propose a new method to count objects of specific categories that are significantly smaller than the ground sampling distance of a satellite image. This task is hard due to the cluttered nature of scenes where different object categories occur. Target objects can be partially occluded, vary in appearance within the same class and look alike to different categories. Since traditional object detection is infeasible due to the small size of objects with respect to the pixel size, we cast object counting as a density estimation problem. To distinguish objects of different classes, our approach …
