Object Counting Across Modalities: Taxonomies, Benchmarks, Applications, and Open Challenges
Object-counting methods have rapidly shifted from class-specific density regression to open-vocabulary, foundation-model-backed counters. These methods now enumerate instances from various visual and textual prompts. While this shift marks major conceptual progress, our survey argues that claims of universal generality have outpaced the evaluative infrastructure. Most progress metrics rely on a few saturated benchmarks that models exploit for statistical regularities. Newly introduced diagnostic datasets reveal systematic failures in semantic grounding, temporal identity, and spatial reasoning with occlusion. To address these failures, we introduce a five-axis taxonomy (modality, mechanis...
| Authors | Joana Konadu Owusu, Shivanand Venkanna Sheshappanavar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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