# Locally Grouped and Scale-Guided Attention for Dense Pest Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16503 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16503/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [Distribution Matching for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13077/) (2020)
- [CrowdNet: A Deep Convolutional Network for Dense Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06197/) (2016)
- [Iterative Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09959/) (2018)
- [Automatic Moth Detection from Trap Images for Pest Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07383/) (2016)
- [Trap-Based Pest Counting: Multiscale and Deformable Attention CenterNet Integrating Internal LR and HR Joint Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02291/) (2023)
- [ROI-Aware Multiscale Cross-Attention Vision Transformer for Pest Image Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16914/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study introduces a new dense pest counting problem to predict densely distributed pests captured by digital traps. Unlike traditional detection-based counting models for sparsely distributed objects, trap-based pest counting must deal with dense pest distributions that pose challenges such as severe occlusion, wide pose variation, and similar appearances in colors and textures. To address these problems, it is essential to incorporate the local attention mechanism, which identifies locally important and unimportant areas to learn locally grouped features, thereby enhancing discriminative performance. Accordingly, this study presents a novel design that integrates locally grouped and scale-guided attention into a multiscale CenterNet framework. To group local features with similar attributes, a straightforward method is introduced using the heatmap predicted by the first hourglass containing pest centroid information, which eliminates the need for complex clustering models. To enhance attentiveness, the pixel attention module transforms the heatmap into a learnable map. Subsequently, scale-guided attention is deployed to make the object and background features more discriminative, achieving multiscale feature fusion. Through experiments, the proposed model is verified to enhance object features based on local grouping and discriminative feature attention learning. Additionally, the proposed model is highly effective in overcoming occlusion and pose variation problems, making it more suitable for dense pest counting. In particular, the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by a large margin, with a remarkable contribution to dense pest counting.