# Bayesian Loss for Crowd Count Estimation with Point Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03684 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03684/

## Key facts

- Cited by 162 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 162)

- [Rethinking Counting and Localization in Crowds:A Purely Point-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12746/) (2021)
- [Learning To Count Everything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08391/) (2021)
- [Represent, Compare, and Learn: A Similarity-Aware Framework for Class-Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08354/) (2022)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13065/) (2022)
- [Boosting Crowd Counting via Multifaceted Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02636/) (2022)
- [TransCrowd: weakly-supervised crowd counting with transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09116/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Spatial Invariance of Convolutional Networks for Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05253/) (2022)
- [CrowdCLIP: Unsupervised Crowd Counting via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04231/) (2023)
- [Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion for RGB-Thermal Perception Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15710/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Harnessing Perceptual Adversarial Patches for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07986/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Uniformity in Heterogeneity:Diving Deep into Count Interval Partition for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12619/) (2021)
- [Domain-General Crowd Counting in Unseen Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02573/) (2022)
- [CrowdDiff: Multi-hypothesis Crowd Density Estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12790/) (2023)
- [Discrete-Constrained Regression for Local Counting Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09865/) (2022)
- [Gramformer: Learning Crowd Counting via Graph-Modulated Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03870/) (2024)
- [Direct Measure Matching for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01558/) (2021)
- [DR.VIC: Decomposition and Reasoning for Video Individual Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12335/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Crowd Counting via Density Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02955/) (2022)
- [Single Domain Generalization for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09124/) (2024)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In crowd counting datasets, each person is annotated by a point, which is usually the center of the head. And the task is to estimate the total count in a crowd scene. Most of the state-of-the-art methods are based on density map estimation, which convert the sparse point annotations into a "ground truth" density map through a Gaussian kernel, and then use it as the learning target to train a density map estimator. However, such a "ground-truth" density map is imperfect due to occlusions, perspective effects, variations in object shapes, etc. On the contrary, we propose Bayesian loss, a novel loss function which constructs a density contribution probability model from the point annotations. Instead of constraining the value at every pixel in the density map, the proposed training loss adopts a more reliable supervision on the count expectation at each annotated point. Without bells and whistles, the loss function makes substantial improvements over the baseline loss on all tested datasets. Moreover, our proposed loss function equipped with a standard backbone network, without using any external detectors or multi-scale architectures, plays favourably against the state of the arts. Our method outperforms previous best approaches by a large margin on the latest and largest UCF-QNRF dataset. The source code is available at urlhttps://github.com/ZhihengCV/Baysian-Crowd-Counting.