Can inception model be used for object counting in an image?

Question

I have already gone through the image classification part in Inception model, but I require to count the objects in the image.

Considering the flowers data-set, one image can have multiple instances of a flower, so how can I get that count?

Answer 1

What you describe is known to research community as Instance-Level Segmentation.

In last year itself there have been a significant spike in papers addressing this problem.

Here are some of the papers:

• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.7144v4.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.08498v3.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.03222v2.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.04889v2.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.08250v3.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.07709v1.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07485v2.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08303v1.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08991v2.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.06661v2.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03129v1.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.09410v4.pdf

As you see in these papers simple object classification network won't solve the problem.

If you search github you will find a few repositories with basic frameworks, you can build on top of them.

• https://github.com/daijifeng001/MNC (caffe)
• https://github.com/bernard24/RIS/blob/master/RIS_infer.ipynb (torch)
• https://github.com/jr0th/segmentation (keras, tensorflow)