Huilin Zhu

Huilin Zhu, Jingling Yuan, Zhengwei Yang et al.

Zero-shot object counting (ZOC) aims to enumerate objects in images using only the names of object classes during testing, without the need for manual annotations. However, a critical challenge in current ZOC methods lies in their inability to identify high-quality exemplars effectively. This deficiency hampers scalability across diverse classes and undermines the development of strong visual associations between the identified classes and image content. To this end, we propose the Visual Association-based Zero-shot Object Counting (VA-Count) framework. VA-Count consists of an Exemplar Enhancement Module (EEM) and a Noise Suppression Module (NSM) that synergistically refine the process of class exemplar identification while minimizing the consequences of incorrect object identification. The EEM utilizes advanced vision-language pretaining models to discover potential exemplars, ensuring the framework's adaptability to various classes. Meanwhile, the NSM employs contrastive learning to differentiate between optimal and suboptimal exemplar pairs, reducing the negative effects of erroneous exemplars. VA-Count demonstrates its effectiveness and scalability in zero-shot contexts with superior performance on two object counting datasets.

Huilin Zhu, Jingling Yuan, Zhengwei Yang et al.

In class-agnostic object counting, the goal is to estimate the total number of object instances in an image without distinguishing between specific categories. Existing methods often predict this count without considering class-specific outputs, leading to inaccuracies when such outputs are required. These inaccuracies stem from two key challenges: 1) the prevalence of single-category images in datasets, which leads models to generalize specific categories as representative of all objects, and 2) the use of mean squared error loss during training, which applies uniform penalization. This uniform penalty disregards errors in less frequent categories, particularly when these errors contribute minimally to the overall loss. To address these issues, we propose {FocalCount}, a novel approach that leverages diverse feature attributes to estimate the number of object categories in an image. This estimate serves as a weighted factor to correct class-count imbalances. Additionally, we introduce {Focal-MSE}, a new loss function that integrates binary cross-entropy to generate stronger error gradients, enhancing the model's sensitivity to errors in underrepresented categories. Our approach significantly improves the model's ability to distinguish between specific classes and general counts, demonstrating superior performance and scalability in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios across three object counting datasets. The code will be released soon.

Wei Cao, Wenxu Song, Xinge Li et al.

This research addressed whether interactions with social robots could facilitate joint attention of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Two conditions of initiators, namely 'Human' vs. 'Robot' were measured with 15 children with ASD and 15 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. Apart from fixation and gaze transition, a new longest common subsequence (LCS) approach was proposed to analyze eye-movement traces. Results revealed that children with ASD showed deficits of joint attention. Compared to the human agent, robot facilitate less fixations towards the targets, but it attracted more attention and allowed the children to show gaze transition and to follow joint attention logic. This results highlight both potential application of LCS analysis on eye-tracking studies and of social robot to intervention.