Subpart Suppression Network for Few-Shot Object Counting

Few-shot object counting and detection aim to count objects along with their bounding boxes specified by exemplar bounding boxes. Current mainstream methods predict density maps by applying similarity between exemplar and image features to get counting results and detecting peak points from the density map as the positions of objects. However, the sub-parts of objects can also have high similarity to the exemplars, harming the counting and detection performance. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage Subpart Suppression Network (SSN), consisting of a Subpart Suppression Density map Predictor (SSDP), which enforces the model focus on whole objects rather than subparts, and a SAM-based Detector and Verifier, which refines the final prediction by a clustering method. Extensive experiments on two popular datasets show an advantage in performance over the state-of-the-art methods and prove the components’ effectiveness.