# Distribution Matching for Crowd Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13077 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13077/

## Key facts

- Cited by 143 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 143)

- [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)
- [Zero-shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02001/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Object Counting and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10988/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Spatial Invariance of Convolutional Networks for Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05253/) (2022)
- [DAVE -- A Detect-and-Verify Paradigm for Low-Shot Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16622/) (2024)
- [VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16580/) (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)
- [A Survey of Camouflaged Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14562/) (2024)
- [Focal Inverse Distance Transform Maps for Crowd Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07925/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Calibrating Uncertainty for Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09887/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SOOD: Towards Semi-Supervised Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04515/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Redesigning Multi-Scale Neural Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02894/) (2022)
- [Single Domain Generalization for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09124/) (2024)
- [On Transportation of Mini-batches: A Hierarchical Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05912/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In crowd counting, each training image contains multiple people, where each person is annotated by a dot. Existing crowd counting methods need to use a Gaussian to smooth each annotated dot or to estimate the likelihood of every pixel given the annotated point. In this paper, we show that imposing Gaussians to annotations hurts generalization performance. Instead, we propose to use Distribution Matching for crowd COUNTing (DM-Count). In DM-Count, we use Optimal Transport (OT) to measure the similarity between the normalized predicted density map and the normalized ground truth density map. To stabilize OT computation, we include a Total Variation loss in our model. We show that the generalization error bound of DM-Count is tighter than that of the Gaussian smoothed methods. In terms of Mean Absolute Error, DM-Count outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on two large-scale counting datasets, UCF-QNRF and NWPU, and achieves the state-of-the-art results on the ShanghaiTech and UCF-CC50 datasets. DM-Count reduced the error of the state-of-the-art published result by approximately 16%. Code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/DM-Count.