# Switching Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.00199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00199/

## Key facts

- Cited by 93 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 93)

- [Learning To Count Everything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08391/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Object Counting with Similarity-Aware Feature Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08959/) (2022)
- [CrowdCLIP: Unsupervised Crowd Counting via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04231/) (2023)
- [STEERER: Resolving Scale Variations for Counting and Localization via Selective Inheritance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10468/) (2023)
- [Focal Inverse Distance Transform Maps for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07925/) (2021)
- [Exemplar Free Class Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14212/) (2022)
- [Detection, Tracking, and Counting Meets Drones in Crowds: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02440/) (2021)
- [CCTrans: Simplifying and Improving Crowd Counting with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14483/) (2021)
- [Cross-View Cross-Scene Multi-View Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01551/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Self-Supervision for Cross-Domain Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16291/) (2021)
- [DR.VIC: Decomposition and Reasoning for Video Individual Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12335/) (2022)
- [Redesigning Multi-Scale Neural Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02894/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Crowd Counting: State-of-the-art, Trends, and Future Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07271/) (2022)
- [Regressor-Segmenter Mutual Prompt Learning for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01711/) (2023)
- [Crowd Counting via Perspective-Guided Fractional-Dilation Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03665/) (2021)
- [Variational Attention: Propagating Domain-Specific Knowledge for Multi-Domain Learning in Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08023/) (2021)
- [CrowdVLM-R1: Expanding R1 Ability to Vision Language Model for Crowd Counting using Fuzzy Group Relative Policy Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03724/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Transformer Based Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01926/) (2021)
- [Crowd Localization from Gaussian Mixture Scoped Knowledge and Scoped Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05717/) (2022)
- [CountFormer: Multi-View Crowd Counting Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02047/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Convolutions with Per-pixel Dynamic Filter Atom](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07895/) (2021)
- [Mind the Prompt: A Novel Benchmark for Prompt-based Class-Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15953/) (2024)
- [Coarse to Fine: Domain Adaptive Crowd Counting via Adversarial Scoring Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12858/) (2021)
- [Backdoor Attacks on Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05641/) (2022)
- [Spatiotemporal Dilated Convolution with Uncertain Matching for Video-based Crowd Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12439/) (2021)
- [Forget Less, Count Better: A Domain-Incremental Self-Distillation Learning Benchmark for Lifelong Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03307/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Global Context in Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10926/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Crowd Counting and Localization By Multitask Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09942/) (2022)
- [CrowdMLP: Weakly-Supervised Crowd Counting via Multi-Granularity MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08219/) (2022)
- [Counting Varying Density Crowds Through Density Guided Adaptive Selection CNN and Transformer Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10075/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 density within an image to improve the accuracy and localization of the predicted crowd count. Patches from a grid within a crowd scene are relayed to independent CNN regressors based on crowd count prediction quality of the CNN established during training. The independent CNN regressors are designed to have different receptive fields and a switch classifier is trained to relay the crowd scene patch to the best CNN regressor. We perform extensive experiments on all major crowd counting datasets and evidence better performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods. We provide interpretable representations of the multichotomy of space of crowd scene patches inferred from the switch. It is observed that the switch relays an image patch to a particular CNN column based on density of crowd.