Papers › VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting

VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting

27 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.16580archive 2025-07-28

Seunggu Kang, WonJun Moon, Euiyeon Kim, Jae-Pil Heo

Zero-Shot Object Counting (ZSOC) aims to count referred instances of arbitrary classes in a query image without human-annotated exemplars. To deal with ZSOC, preceding studies proposed a two-stage pipeline: discovering exemplars and counting. However, there remains a challenge of vulnerability to error propagation of the sequentially designed two-stage process. In this work, an one-stage baseline, Visual-Language Baseline (VLBase), exploring the implicit association of the semantic-patch embeddings of CLIP is proposed. Subsequently, the extension of VLBase to Visual-language Counter (VLCounter) is achieved by incorporating three modules devised to tailor VLBase for object counting. First, Semantic-conditioned Prompt Tuning (SPT) is introduced within the image encoder to acquire target-highlighted representations. Second, Learnable Affine Transformation (LAT) is employed to translate the semantic-patch similarity map to be appropriate for the counting task. Lastly, the layer-wisely encoded features are transferred to the decoder through Segment-aware Skip Connection (SaSC) to keep the generalization capability for unseen classes. Through extensive experiments on FSC147, CARPK, and PUCPR+, the benefits of the end-to-end framework, VLCounter, are demonstrated.

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Code

seunggu0305/vlcounter officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

DecoderObject CountingZero-Shot Counting

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Object Counting CARPK VLCounter MAE 6.46 #6 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Object Counting CARPK VLCounter RMSE 8.68 #6 of 15 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CLIP

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