Depth-Guided Video Object Counting in Crowded Scenes

Abstract

Our primary objective is to advance video object counting in crowded scenes, aiming to robustly count all instances of a target category based on given text or visual prompts. Existing methods rely on RGB information, limiting their discriminative ability in crowded and occluded conditions. To address this, we propose a Depth-Guided Detector (DG-Det) along with a general post-processing pipeline. By integrating depth cues with multi-scale RGB-D cross-attention and explicit occlusion prediction, our method enhances spatial understanding and achieves robust detection in crowded and occluded scenes. Furthermore, we introduce a unified de-duplication framework to eliminate cross-frame redundant counting. To facilitate future research, we also release a new RGB-D Video Object Counting dataset featuring depth information and multiple object categories persequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a 62.01\% reduction in MAE compared to existing baselines, and also produces consistent improvements in RMSE. We provide the source code at https://github.com/streamer-AP/DG-Net and the dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/aerospace123/RGBD-VideoCount.