Reverse perspective network for perspective-aware object counting

One of the critical challenges of object counting is the dramatic scale variations, which is introduced by arbitrary perspectives. We propose a reverse perspective network to solve the scale variations of input images, instead of generating perspective maps to smooth final outputs. The reverse perspective network explicitly evaluates the perspective distortions, and efficiently corrects the distortions by uniformly warping the input images. Then the proposed network delivers images with similar instance scales to the regressor. Thus the regression network doesn't need multi-scale receptive fields to match the various scales. Besides, to further solve the scale problem of more congested areas, we enhance the corresponding regions of ground-truth with the evaluation errors. Then we force the regressor to learn from the augmented ground-truth via an adversarial process. Furthermore, to verify the proposed model, we collected a vehicle counting dataset based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The proposed dataset has fierce scale variations. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets show the improvements of our method against the state-of-the-arts.