# Rethinking Cell Counting Methods: Decoupling Counting and Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13989/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [CSRNet: Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding the Highly Congested Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10062/) (2018)
- [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)
- [DecideNet: Counting Varying Density Crowds Through Attention Guided Detection and Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06679/) (2017)
- [Improving Deep Regression with Ordinal Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08915/) (2023)
- [Learning Spatial Awareness to Improve Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07057/) (2019)
- [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)
- [FusionCount: Efficient Crowd Counting via Multiscale Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13660/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [CountXplain: Interpretable Cell Counting with Prototype-Based Density Map Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19686/) (2025)
- [OCCAM: Class-Agnostic, Training-Free, Prior-Free and Multi-Class Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13871/) (2026)
- [Rank-Aware Agglomeration of Foundation Models for Immunohistochemistry Image Cell Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12588/) (2025)
- [MicroscopyMatching: Towards a Ready-to-use Framework for Microscopy Image Analysis in Diverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14980/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cell counting in microscopy images is vital in medicine and biology but extremely tedious and time-consuming to perform manually. While automated methods have advanced in recent years, state-of-the-art approaches tend to increasingly complex model designs. In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective decoupled learning scheme for automated cell counting, consisting of separate counter and localizer networks. In contrast to jointly learning counting and density map estimation, we show that decoupling these objectives surprisingly improves results. The counter operates on intermediate feature maps rather than pixel space to leverage global context and produce count estimates, while also generating coarse density maps. The localizer then reconstructs high-resolution density maps that precisely localize individual cells, conditional on the original images and coarse density maps from the counter. Besides, to boost counting accuracy, we further introduce a global message passing module to integrate cross-region patterns. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our approach, despite its simplicity, challenges common practice and achieves state-of-the-art performance by significant margins. Our key insight is that decoupled learning alleviates the need to learn counting on high-resolution density maps directly, allowing the model to focus on global features critical for accurate estimates. Code is available at https://github.com/MedAITech/DCL.