Version with high-quality images can be found at https://etd.adm.unipi.it/theses/available/etd-04262022-163702/. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1802.03601, arXiv:1707.01202, arXiv:1809.02165, arXiv:1901.06026, arXiv:1808.01244 by other authors
In this dissertation, we investigated and enhanced Deep Learning (DL) techniques for counting objects, like pedestrians, cells or vehicles, in still images or video frames. In particular, we tackled the challenge related to the lack of data needed for training current DL-based solutions. Given that the budget for labeling is limited, data scarcity still represents an open problem that prevents the scalability of existing solutions based on the supervised learning of neural networks and that is responsible for a significant drop in performance at inference time when new scenarios are presented to these algorithms. We introduced solutions addressing this issue from several complementary sides, collecting datasets gathered from virtual environments automatically labeled, proposing Domain Adaptation strategies aiming at mitigating the domain gap existing between the training and test data distributions, and presenting a counting strategy in a weakly labeled data scenario, i.e., in the presence of non-negligible disagreement between multiple annotators. Moreover, we tackled the non-trivial engineering challenges coming out of the adoption of Convolutional Neural Network-based techniques in environments with limited power resources, introducing solutions for counting vehicles and pedestrians directly onboard embedded vision systems, i.e., devices equipped with constrained computational capabilities that can capture images and elaborate them.
In this paper we propose a technique to adapt a convolutional neural network (CNN) based object counter to additional visual domains and object types while still preserving the original counting function. Domain-specific normalisation and scaling operators are trained to allow the model to adjust to the statistical distributions of the various visual domains. The developed adaptation technique is used to produce a singular patch-based counting regressor capable of counting various object types including people, vehicles, cell nuclei and wildlife. As part of this study a challenging new cell co…
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Visual crowd counting has been recently studied as a way to enable people counting in crowd scenes from images. Albeit successful, vision-based crowd counting approaches could fail to capture informative features in extreme conditions, e.g., imaging at night and occlusion. In this work, we introduce a novel task of audiovisual crowd counting, in which visual and auditory information are integrated for counting purposes. We collect a large-scale benchmark, named auDiovISual Crowd cOunting (DISCO) dataset, consisting of 1,935 images and the corresponding audio clips, and 170,270 annotated instan…
CountEx: Fine-Grained Counting via Exemplars and Exclusion
Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University（计算机科学系，石英布鲁克大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, Adelaide University（澳大利亚机器学习研究所，阿德莱德大学）
In this paper, we investigate the problem of counting rosette leaves from an RGB image, an important task in plant phenotyping. We propose a data-driven approach for this task generalized over different plant species and imaging setups. To accomplish this task, we use state-of-the-art deep learning architectures: a deconvolutional network for initial segmentation and a convolutional network for leaf counting. Evaluation is performed on the leaf counting challenge dataset at CVPPP-2017. Despite the small number of training samples in this dataset, as compared to typical deep learning image sets…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Single image crowd counting is a challenging computer vision problem with wide applications in public safety, city planning, traffic management, etc. With the recent development of deep learning techniques, crowd counting has aroused much attention and achieved great success in recent years. This survey is to provide a comprehensive summary of recent advances on deep learning-based crowd counting techniques via density map estimation by systematically reviewing and summarizing more than 200 works in the area since 2015. Our goals are to provide an up-to-date review of recent approaches, and ed…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（数据洞察中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
In this paper we propose ResnetCrowd, a deep residual architecture for simultaneous crowd counting, violent behaviour detection and crowd density level classification. To train and evaluate the proposed multi-objective technique, a new 100 image dataset referred to as Multi Task Crowd is constructed. This new dataset is the first computer vision dataset fully annotated for crowd counting, violent behaviour detection and density level classification. Our experiments show that a multi-task approach boosts individual task performance for all tasks and most notably for violent behaviour detection …
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing（上海市多维信息处理重点实验室）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Videt Tech Ltd.（维谛科技有限公司）
Automatic analysis of highly crowded people has attracted extensive attention from computer vision research. Previous approaches for crowd counting have already achieved promising performance across various benchmarks. However, to deal with the real situation, we hope the model run as fast as possible while keeping accuracy. In this paper, we propose a compact convolutional neural network for crowd counting which learns a more efficient model with a small number of parameters. With three parallel filters executing the convolutional operation on the input image simultaneously at the front of th…
School of Computer Science（计算机学院）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Crowd counting is a task worth exploring in modern society because of its wide applications such as public safety and video monitoring. Many CNN-based approaches have been proposed to improve the accuracy of estimation, but there are some inherent issues affect the performance, such as overfitting and details lost caused by pooling layers. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose an effective network called MDSNet, which introduces a novel supervision framework called Multi-channel Deep Supervision (MDS). The MDS conducts channel-wise supervision on the decoder of the estimation mod…
In this paper, we attempt to address the challenging problem of counting built-structures in the satellite imagery. Building density is a more accurate estimate of the population density, urban area expansion and its impact on the environment, than the built-up area segmentation. However, building shape variances, overlapping boundaries, and variant densities make this a complex task. To tackle this difficult problem, we propose a deep learning based regression technique for counting built-structures in satellite imagery. Our proposed framework intelligently combines features from different re…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（Inception人工智能研究院）
This paper strives for repetitive activity counting in videos. Different from existing works, which all analyze the visual video content only, we incorporate for the first time the corresponding sound into the repetition counting process. This benefits accuracy in challenging vision conditions such as occlusion, dramatic camera view changes, low resolution, etc. We propose a model that starts with analyzing the sight and sound streams separately. Then an audiovisual temporal stride decision module and a reliability estimation module are introduced to exploit cross-modal temporal interaction. F…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）
Crowd counting is an important task that shown great application value in public safety-related fields, which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In the current research, the accuracy of counting numbers and crowd density estimation are the main concerns. Although the emergence of deep learning has greatly promoted the development of this field, crowd counting under cluttered background is still a serious challenge. In order to solve this problem, we propose a ScaleAware Crowd Counting Network (SACCN) with regional and semantic attentions. The proposed SACCN distinguishes crowd…
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）
Counting Beyond Instances: A Benchmark for Group-Individual Object Counting
School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Datasets for training crowd counting deep networks are typically heavy-tailed in count distribution and exhibit discontinuities across the count range. As a result, the de facto statistical measures (MSE, MAE) exhibit large variance and tend to be unreliable indicators of performance across the count range. To address these concerns in a holistic manner, we revise processes at various stages of the standard crowd counting pipeline. To enable principled and balanced minibatch sampling, we propose a novel smoothed Bayesian sample stratification approach. We propose a novel cost function which ca…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）
We have created a large diverse set of cars from overhead images, which are useful for training a deep learner to binary classify, detect and count them. The dataset and all related material will be made publically available. The set contains contextual matter to aid in identification of difficult targets. We demonstrate classification and detection on this dataset using a neural network we call ResCeption. This network combines residual learning with Inception-style layers and is used to count cars in one look. This is a new way to count objects rather than by localization or density estimati…
Prince Sultan University（苏丹王子大学）；CISTER, INESC-TEC, ISEP, Polytechnic Institute of Porto（波尔图理工学院ISEP的INESC-TEC旗下CISTER（注：因原文为层级关联机构，按要求提取到学院/研究院级别，整合为：波尔图理工学院）
In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework for the automated counting and geolocation of palm trees from aerial images using convolutional neural networks. For this purpose, we collected aerial images in a palm tree Farm in the Kharj region, in Riyadh Saudi Arabia, using DJI drones, and we built a dataset of around 10,000 instances of palms trees. Then, we developed a convolutional neural network model using the state-of-the-art, Faster R-CNN algorithm. Furthermore, using the geotagged metadata of aerial images, we used photogrammetry concepts and distance corrections to detect the ge…
Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina（圣卡塔琳娜联邦大学）；Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior（马克斯·普朗克动物行为研究所）；Universidade Federal do Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）；Witwatersrand University（威特沃特斯兰德大学）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）
Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently. Counting animals from such data is challenging, particularly when densely packed in noisy images. Attempting this manually is slow and expensive, while traditional computer vision methods are limited in their generalisability. Deep learning is the …
In this paper, we describe our study on how humans allocate their attention during visual crowd counting. Using an eye tracker, we collect gaze behavior of human participants who are tasked with counting the number of people in crowd images. Analyzing the collected gaze behavior of ten human participants on thirty crowd images, we observe some common approaches for visual counting. For an image of a small crowd, the approach is to enumerate over all people or groups of people in the crowd, and this explains the high level of similarity between the fixation density maps of different human parti…
This paper focuses on visual counting, which aims to predict the number of occurrences given a natural image and a query (e.g. a question or a category). Unlike most prior works that use explicit, symbolic models which can be computationally expensive and limited in generalization, we propose a simple and effective alternative by revisiting modulated convolutions that fuse the query and the image locally. Following the design of residual bottleneck, we call our method MoVie, short for Modulated conVolutional bottlenecks. Notably, MoVie reasons implicitly and holistically and only needs a singl…
Images and video frames captured by cameras placed throughout smart cities are often transmitted over the network to a server to be processed by deep neural networks for various tasks. Transmission of raw images, i.e., without any form of compression, requires high bandwidth and can lead to congestion issues and delays in transmission. The use of lossy image compression techniques can reduce the quality of the images, leading to accuracy degradation. In this paper, we analyze the effect of applying low-overhead lossy image compression methods on the accuracy of visual crowd counting, and measu…
Many visual recognition problems can be approached by counting instances. To determine whether an event is present in a long internet video, one could count how many frames seem to contain the activity. Classifying the activity of a group of people can be done by counting the actions of individual people. Encoding these cardinality relationships can reduce sensitivity to clutter, in the form of irrelevant frames or individuals not involved in a group activity. Learned parameters can encode how many instances tend to occur in a class of interest. To this end, this paper develops a powerful and …
In this paper, we propose a novel sparse coding and counting method under Bayesian framwork for visual tracking. In contrast to existing methods, the proposed method employs the combination of L0 and L1 norm to regularize the linear coefficients of incrementally updated linear basis. The sparsity constraint enables the tracker to effectively handle difficult challenges, such as occlusion or image corruption. To achieve realtime processing, we propose a fast and efficient numerical algorithm for solving the proposed model. Although it is an NP-hard problem, the proposed accelerated proximal gra…
University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）；NUST（巴基斯坦国立科技大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
Crowd estimation is a very challenging problem. The most recent study tries to exploit auditory information to aid the visual models, however, the performance is limited due to the lack of an effective approach for feature extraction and integration. The paper proposes a new audiovisual multi-task network to address the critical challenges in crowd counting by effectively utilizing both visual and audio inputs for better modalities association and productive feature extraction. The proposed network introduces the notion of auxiliary and explicit image patch-importance ranking (PIR) and patch-w…
Background noise and scale variation are common problems that have been long recognized in crowd counting. Humans glance at a crowd image and instantly know the approximate number of human and where they are through attention the crowd regions and the congestion degree of crowd regions with a global receptive field. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel feedback network with Region-Aware block called RANet by modeling humans Top-Down visual perception mechanism. Firstly, we introduce a feedback architecture to generate priority maps that provide prior about candidate crowd regions in input …
In this paper, we address the challenging problem of crowd counting in congested scenes. Specifically, we present Inverse Attention Guided Deep Crowd Counting Network (IA-DCCN) that efficiently infuses segmentation information through an inverse attention mechanism into the counting network, resulting in significant improvements. The proposed method, which is based on VGG-16, is a single-step training framework and is simple to implement. The use of segmentation information results in minimal computational overhead and does not require any additional annotations. We demonstrate the significanc…
Istituto Sistemi e Electronica Applicata (ISEA)（应用系统与电子研究所）；Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI)（瑞士意大利语区应用科技大学）；Grupo de investigacion SISTEMIC（SISTEMIC研究组）；Facultad de Ingenieria, Universidad de Antioquia UdeA（安蒂奥基亚大学工程学院）
An automatic approach to counting any kind of cells could alleviate work of the experts and boost the research in fields such as regenerative medicine. In this paper, a method for microscopy cell counting using multiple frames (hence temporal information) is proposed. Unlike previous approaches where the cell counting is done independently in each frame (static cell counting), in this work the cell counting prediction is done using multiple frames (dynamic cell counting). A spatiotemporal model using ConvNets and long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks is proposed to overcome t…
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Crowd counting problem that counts the number of people in an image has been extensively studied in recent years. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of crowd counting problem, namely "Categorized Crowd Counting", that counts the number of people sitting and standing in a given image. Categorized crowd counting has many real-world applications such as crowd monitoring, customer service, and resource management. The major challenges in categorized crowd counting come from high occlusion, perspective distortion and the seemingly identical upper body posture of sitting and standing persons.…
Questions that require counting a variety of objects in images remain a major challenge in visual question answering (VQA). The most common approaches to VQA involve either classifying answers based on fixed length representations of both the image and question or summing fractional counts estimated from each section of the image. In contrast, we treat counting as a sequential decision process and force our model to make discrete choices of what to count. Specifically, the model sequentially selects from detected objects and learns interactions between objects that influence subsequent selecti…
University Of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；IMT Lucca（卢卡IMT高等研究院）
The number of leaves a plant has is one of the key traits (phenotypes) describing its development and growth. Here, we propose an automated, deep learning based approach for counting leaves in model rosette plants. While state-of-the-art results on leaf counting with deep learning methods have recently been reported, they obtain the count as a result of leaf segmentation and thus require per-leaf (instance) segmentation to train the models (a rather strong annotation). Instead, our method treats leaf counting as a direct regression problem and thus only requires as annotation the total leaf co…
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；Institute of Smart City, Shanghai University（上海大学智慧城市研究院）；Anyang Institute of Technology（安阳工学院）
Computer vision techniques have been used to produce accurate and generic crowd count estimators in recent years. Due to severe occlusions, appearance variations, perspective distortions and illumination conditions, crowd counting is a very challenging task. To this end, we propose a deep spatial regression model(DSRM) for counting the number of individuals present in a still image with arbitrary perspective and arbitrary resolution. Our proposed model is based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and long short term memory (LSTM). First, we put the images into a pretrained CNN to extract a s…
Video Analytics Lab（视频分析实验室）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学研究院）
Our work proposes a novel deep learning framework for estimating crowd density from static images of highly dense crowds. We use a combination of deep and shallow, fully convolutional networks to predict the density map for a given crowd image. Such a combination is used for effectively capturing both the high-level semantic information (face/body detectors) and the low-level features (blob detectors), that are necessary for crowd counting under large scale variations. As most crowd datasets have limited training samples (<100 images) and deep learning based approaches require large amounts of…
A Transformer-based Multimodal Fusion Model for Efficient Crowd Counting Using Visual and Wireless Signals
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin（都柏林大学电子与电气工程学院）；College of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学电气工程与自动化学院）
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Machine learning models tend to over-rely on statistical shortcuts. These spurious correlations between parts of the input and the output labels does not hold in real-world settings. We target this issue on the recent open-ended visual counting task which is well suited to study statistical shortcuts. We aim to develop models that learn a proper mechanism of counting regardless of the output label. First, we propose the Modifying Count Distribution (MCD) protocol, which penalizes models that over-rely on statistical shortcuts. It is based on pairs of training and testing sets that do not follo…
