# Embodied Crowd Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08367 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08367/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Exploration by Random Network Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12894/) (2018)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15852/) (2024)
- [Cognitive Mapping and Planning for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03920/) (2017)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [RIO: 3D Object Instance Re-Localization in Changing Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06109/) (2019)
- [Composition Loss for Counting, Density Map Estimation and Localization in Dense Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01050/) (2018)
- [CPT: Colorful Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11797/) (2021)
- [ZSON: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation using Multimodal Goal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12403/) (2022)
- [Omni3D: A Large Benchmark and Model for 3D Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10660/) (2022)
- [InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04882/) (2024)
- [NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03360/) (2020)
- [EmbodiedScan: A Holistic Multi-Modal 3D Perception Suite Towards Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16170/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO 1.5: Advance the "Edge" of Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10300/) (2024)
- [AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06735/) (2023)
- [Learning Exploration Policies for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01959/) (2019)
- [JHU-CROWD++: Large-Scale Crowd Counting Dataset and A Benchmark Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03597/) (2020)
- [Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07087/) (2024)
- [OpenFMNav: Towards Open-Set Zero-Shot Object Navigation via Vision-Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10670/) (2024)
- [Point in, Box out: Beyond Counting Persons in Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01333/) (2019)
- [Point-Query Quadtree for Crowd Counting, Localization, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13814/) (2023)
- [Interesting Object, Curious Agent: Learning Task-Agnostic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13119/) (2021)
- [MVD-Fusion: Single-view 3D via Depth-consistent Multi-view Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03656/) (2024)
- [Change Guiding Network: Incorporating Change Prior to Guide Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09179/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Video Individual Counting and Tracking from Moving Drones: A Benchmark and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12500/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Occlusion is one of the fundamental challenges in crowd counting. In the community, various data-driven approaches have been developed to address this issue, yet their effectiveness is limited. This is mainly because most existing crowd counting datasets on which the methods are trained are based on passive cameras, restricting their ability to fully sense the environment. Recently, embodied navigation methods have shown significant potential in precise object detection in interactive scenes. These methods incorporate active camera settings, holding promise in addressing the fundamental issues in crowd counting. However, most existing methods are designed for indoor navigation, showing unknown performance in analyzing complex object distribution in large scale scenes, such as crowds. Besides, most existing embodied navigation datasets are indoor scenes with limited scale and object quantity, preventing them from being introduced into dense crowd analysis. Based on this, a novel task, Embodied Crowd Counting (ECC), is proposed. We first build up an interactive simulator, Embodied Crowd Counting Dataset (ECCD), which enables large scale scenes and large object quantity. A prior probability distribution that approximates realistic crowd distribution is introduced to generate crowds. Then, a zero-shot navigation method (ZECC) is proposed. This method contains a MLLM driven coarse-to-fine navigation mechanism, enabling active Z-axis exploration, and a normal-line-based crowd distribution analysis method for fine counting. Experimental results against baselines show that the proposed method achieves the best trade-off between counting accuracy and navigation cost.