Manifold-Based Visual Object Counting

Visual object counting (VOC) is an emerging area in computer vision which aims to estimate the number of objects of interest in a given image or video. Recently, object density based estimation method is shown to be promising for object counting as well as rough instance localization. However, the performance of this method tends to degrade when dealing with new objects and scenes. To address this limitation, we propose a manifold-based method for visual object counting (M-VOC), based on the manifold assumption that similar image patches share similar object densities. Firstly, the local geometry of a given image patch is represented linearly by its neighbors using a predefined patch training set, and the object density of this given image patch is reconstructed by preserving the local geometry using locally linear embedding. To improve the characterization of local geometry, additional constraints such as sparsity and non-negativity are also considered via regularization, nonlinear mapping, and kernel trick. Compared with the state-of-the-art VOC methods, our proposed M-VOC methods achieve competitive performance on seven benchmark datasets. Experiments verify that the proposed M-VOC methods have several favorable properties, such as robustness to the variation in the size of training dataset and image resolution, as often encountered in real-world VOC applications.