# Crowd Counting with Sparse Annotation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06021/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Counting and Localization in Crowds:A Purely Point-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12746/) (2021)
- [NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03360/) (2020)
- [Context-Aware Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10452/) (2018)
- [Distribution Matching for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13077/) (2020)
- [JHU-CROWD++: Large-Scale Crowd Counting Dataset and A Benchmark Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03597/) (2020)
- [Switching Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00199/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Leveraging Unlabeled Data for Crowd Counting by Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03095/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ADCrowdNet: An Attention-injective Deformable Convolutional Network for Crowd Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11968/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting via Self-Training on Surrogate Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03207/) (2020)
- [Towards Using Count-level Weak Supervision for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00164/) (2020)
- [HA-CCN: Hierarchical Attention-based Crowd Counting Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10255/) (2019)
- [Weighing Counts: Sequential Crowd Counting by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08260/) (2020)
- [Shallow Feature Based Dense Attention Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09853/) (2020)
- [Learning to Count in the Crowd from Limited Labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03195/) (2020)
- [Completely Self-Supervised Crowd Counting via Distribution Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06420/) (2020)
- [Uniformity in Heterogeneity:Diving Deep into Count Interval Partition for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12619/) (2021)
- [Discrete-Constrained Regression for Local Counting Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09865/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Crowd Counting via Density Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02955/) (2022)
- [Scene-Adaptive Attention Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15509/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a new annotation method called Sparse Annotation (SA) for crowd counting, which reduces human labeling efforts by sparsely labeling individuals in an image. We argue that sparse labeling can reduce the redundancy of full annotation and capture more diverse information from distant individuals that is not fully captured by Partial Annotation methods. Besides, we propose a point-based Progressive Point Matching network (PPM) to better explore the crowd from the whole image with sparse annotation, which includes a Proposal Matching Network (PMN) and a Performance Restoration Network (PRN). The PMN generates pseudo-point samples using a basic point classifier, while the PRN refines the point classifier with the pseudo points to maximize performance. Our experimental results show that PPM outperforms previous semi-supervised crowd counting methods with the same amount of annotation by a large margin and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods.