text: We propose a novel crowd counting model that maps a given crowd scene to its density. Crowd analysis is compounded by myriad of factors like inter-occlusion between people due to extreme crowding, high similarity of appearance between people and background elements, and large variability of camera view-points. Current state-of-the art approaches tackle these factors by using multi-scale CNN architectures, recurrent networks and late fusion of features from multi-column CNN with different receptive fields. We propose switching convolutional neural network that leverages variation of crowd density within an image to improve the accuracy and localization of the predicted crowd count. Patches from a grid within a crowd scene are relayed to independent CNN regressors based on crowd count prediction quality of the CNN established during training. The independent CNN regressors are designed to have different receptive fields and a switch classifier is trained to relay the crowd scene patch to the best CNN regressor. We perform extensive experiments on all major crowd counting datasets and evidence better performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods. We provide interpretable representations of the multichotomy of space of crowd scene patches inferred from the switch. It is observed that the switch relays an image patch to a particular CNN column based on density of crowd.
  @cite_13: Current state of the art object recognition architectures achieve impressive performance but are typically specialized for a single depictive style (e.g. photos only, sketches only). In this paper, we present SwiDeN : our Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture which recognizes objects regardless of how they are visually depicted (line drawing, realistic shaded drawing, photograph etc.). In SwiDeN, we utilize a novel deep' depictive style-based switching mechanism which appropriately addresses the depiction-specific and depiction-invariant aspects of the problem. We compare SwiDeN with alternative architectures and prior work on a 50-category Photo-Art dataset containing objects depicted in multiple styles. Experimental results show that SwiDeN outperforms other approaches for the depiction-invariant object recognition problem.
summary: While switching architectures have not been used for counting, expert classifiers have been used by @cite_13 to improve single object image classification across depiction styles using a deep switching mechanism based on depiction style. However unlike @cite_13 , we do not have labels (For eg: Depiction styles like "art" and "photo") to train the switch classifier. To overcome this challenge, we propose a training regime that exploits CNN regressor's architectural differences (See Section )