Adaptive Dilated Network with Self-Correction Supervision for Counting

The counting problem aims to estimate the number of objects in images. Due to large scale variation and labeling deviations, it remains a challenging task. The static density map supervised learning framework is widely used in existing methods, which uses the Gaussian kernel to generate a density map as the learning target and utilizes the Euclidean distance to optimize the model. However, the framework is intolerable to the labeling deviations and can not reflect the scale variation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive dilated convolution and a novel supervised learning framework named self-correction (SC) supervision. In the supervision level, the SC supervision utilizes the outputs of the model to iteratively correct the annotations and employs the SC loss to simultaneously optimize the model from both the whole and the individuals. In the feature level, the proposed adaptive dilated convolution predicts a continuous value as the specific dilation rate for each location, which adapts the scale variation better than a discrete and static dilation rate. Extensive experiments illustrate that our approach has achieved a consistent improvement on four challenging benchmarks. Especially, our approach achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on all benchmark datasets.