# DENet: A Universal Network for Counting Crowd with Varying Densities and Scales

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08056/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Crowd Counting via Perspective-Guided Fractional-Dilation Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03665/) (2021)
- [Backbones-Review: Feature Extraction Networks for Deep Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08016/) (2022)
- [Space-Air-Ground Integrated Multi-domain Network Resource Orchestration based on Virtual Network Architecture: a DRL Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02459/) (2022)
- [An Improved Normed-Deformable Convolution for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08084/) (2022)
- [Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17137/) (2025)
- [DenseControl: Instance-Level Controllable Synthesis of Dense Crowd Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15592/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Counting people or objects with significantly varying scales and densities has attracted much interest from the research community and yet it remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a simple but an efficient and effective network, named DENet, which is composed of two components, i.e., a detection network (DNet) and an encoder-decoder estimation network (ENet). We first run DNet on an input image to detect and count individuals who can be segmented clearly. Then, ENet is utilized to estimate the density maps of the remaining areas, where the numbers of individuals cannot be detected. We propose a modified Xception as an encoder for feature extraction and a combination of dilated convolution and transposed convolution as a decoder. In the ShanghaiTech Part A, UCF and WorldExpo'10 datasets, our DENet achieves lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE) than those of the state-of-the-art methods.