# DLA-Count: Dynamic Label Assignment Network for Dense Cell Distribution Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12063/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [CSRNet: Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding the Highly Congested Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10062/) (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)
- [Improving Deep Regression with Ordinal Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08915/) (2023)
- [Nuclei instance segmentation and classification in histopathology images with StarDist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02284/) (2022)
- [Count-ception: Counting by Fully Convolutional Redundant Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08710/) (2017)
- [People, Penguins and Petri Dishes: Adapting Object Counting Models To New Visual Domains And Object Types Without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05586/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cell counting remains a fundamental yet challenging task in medical and biological research due to the diverse morphology of cells, their dense distribution, and variations in image quality. We present DLA-Count, a breakthrough approach to cell counting that introduces three key innovations: (1) K-adjacent Hungarian Matching (KHM), which dramatically improves cell matching in dense regions, (2) Multi-scale Deformable Gaussian Convolution (MDGC), which adapts to varying cell morphologies, and (3) Gaussian-enhanced Feature Decoder (GFD) for efficient multi-scale feature fusion. Our extensive experiments on four challenging cell counting datasets (ADI, MBM, VGG, and DCC) demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods across diverse datasets, with improvements in Mean Absolute Error of up to 46.7% on ADI and 42.5% on MBM datasets. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DLA-Count.