# PANet: Perspective-Aware Network with Dynamic Receptive Fields and Self-Distilling Supervision for Crowd Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00406/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [CSRNet: Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding the Highly Congested Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10062/) (2018)
- [Composition Loss for Counting, Density Map Estimation and Localization in Dense Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01050/) (2018)
- [Bayesian Loss for Crowd Count Estimation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03684/) (2019)
- [Context-Aware Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10452/) (2018)
- [Learning from Synthetic Data for Crowd Counting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03303/) (2019)
- [Distribution Matching for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13077/) (2020)
- [Switching Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00199/) (2017)
- [Point in, Box out: Beyond Counting Persons in Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01333/) (2019)
- [Crowd Counting and Density Estimation by Trellis Encoder-Decoder Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00853/) (2019)
- [Generating High-Quality Crowd Density Maps using Contextual Pyramid CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00953/) (2017)
- [Perspective-Guided Convolution Networks for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06966/) (2019)
- [CrowdNet: A Deep Convolutional Network for Dense Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06197/) (2016)
- [DecideNet: Counting Varying Density Crowds Through Attention Guided Detection and Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06679/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Perspective Information for Efficient Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01989/) (2018)
- [From Open Set to Closed Set: Counting Objects by Spatial Divide-and-Conquer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06473/) (2019)
- [Crowd Counting with Deep Structured Scale Integration Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08692/) (2019)
- [ADCrowdNet: An Attention-injective Deformable Convolutional Network for Crowd Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11968/) (2018)
- [Learning Spatial Awareness to Improve Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07057/) (2019)
- [Counting with Focus for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12206/) (2019)
- [Encoder-Decoder Based Convolutional Neural Networks with Multi-Scale-Aware Modules for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05586/) (2020)
- [Crowd Counting using Deep Recurrent Spatial-Aware Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00601/) (2018)
- [Divide and Grow: Capturing Huge Diversity in Crowd Images with Incrementally Growing CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09993/) (2018)
- [Improving the Learning of Multi-column Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07608/) (2019)
- [Top-Down Feedback for Crowd Counting Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08881/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Crowd counting aims to learn the crowd density distributions and estimate the number of objects (e.g. persons) in images. The perspective effect, which significantly influences the distribution of data points, plays an important role in crowd counting. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective-aware approach called PANet to address the perspective problem. Based on the observation that the size of the objects varies greatly in one image due to the perspective effect, we propose the dynamic receptive fields (DRF) framework. The framework is able to adjust the receptive field by the dilated convolution parameters according to the input image, which helps the model to extract more discriminative features for each local region. Different from most previous works which use Gaussian kernels to generate the density map as the supervised information, we propose the self-distilling supervision (SDS) training method. The ground-truth density maps are refined from the first training stage and the perspective information is distilled to the model in the second stage. The experimental results on ShanghaiTech Part_A and Part_B, UCF_QNRF, and UCF_CC_50 datasets demonstrate that our proposed PANet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.