# Locate, Size and Count: Accurately Resolving People in Dense Crowds via Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 73 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Rethinking Counting and Localization in Crowds:A Purely Point-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12746/) (2021)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13065/) (2022)
- [TransCrowd: weakly-supervised crowd counting with transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09116/) (2021)
- [CrowdCLIP: Unsupervised Crowd Counting via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04231/) (2023)
- [Data Poisoning Won't Save You From Facial Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14851/) (2021)
- [Tracking Pedestrian Heads in Dense Crowd](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13516/) (2021)
- [STEERER: Resolving Scale Variations for Counting and Localization via Selective Inheritance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10468/) (2023)
- [Point-Query Quadtree for Crowd Counting, Localization, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13814/) (2023)
- [Spatial Uncertainty-Aware Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13271/) (2021)
- [Focal Inverse Distance Transform Maps for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07925/) (2021)
- [Continual Learning with Bayesian Model based on a Fixed Pre-trained Feature Extractor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13349/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Self-Supervision for Cross-Domain Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16291/) (2021)
- [The Caltech Fish Counting Dataset: A Benchmark for Multiple-Object Tracking and Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09295/) (2022)
- [Calibrating Uncertainty for Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09887/) (2023)
- [Improving Point-based Crowd Counting and Localization Based on Auxiliary Point Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10589/) (2024)
- [CrowdDiff: Multi-hypothesis Crowd Density Estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12790/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Counting Crowds in Bad Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01209/) (2023)
- [Boosting Detection in Crowd Analysis via Underutilized Output Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16187/) (2023)
- [Video Crowd Localization with Multi-focus Gaussian Neighborhood Attention and a Large-Scale Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08645/) (2021)
- [Congested Crowd Instance Localization with Dilated Convolutional Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00584/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal Crowd Counting via a Broker Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07518/) (2024)
- [Dense Point Prediction: A Simple Baseline for Crowd Counting and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12505/) (2021)
- [Spatiotemporal Dilated Convolution with Uncertain Matching for Video-based Crowd Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12439/) (2021)
- [RGB-D Indiscernible Object Counting in Underwater Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11677/) (2023)
- [Multiscale Crowd Counting and Localization By Multitask Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09942/) (2022)
- [Counting Varying Density Crowds Through Density Guided Adaptive Selection CNN and Transformer Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10075/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a detection framework for dense crowd counting and eliminate the need for the prevalent density regression paradigm. Typical counting models predict crowd density for an image as opposed to detecting every person. These regression methods, in general, fail to localize persons accurate enough for most applications other than counting. Hence, we adopt an architecture that locates every person in the crowd, sizes the spotted heads with bounding box and then counts them. Compared to normal object or face detectors, there exist certain unique challenges in designing such a detection system. Some of them are direct consequences of the huge diversity in dense crowds along with the need to predict boxes contiguously. We solve these issues and develop our LSC-CNN model, which can reliably detect heads of people across sparse to dense crowds. LSC-CNN employs a multi-column architecture with top-down feedback processing to better resolve persons and produce refined predictions at multiple resolutions. Interestingly, the proposed training regime requires only point head annotation, but can estimate approximate size information of heads. We show that LSC-CNN not only has superior localization than existing density regressors, but outperforms in counting as well. The code for our approach is available at https://github.com/val-iisc/lsc-cnn.