1 Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE), Concordia University, Montréal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada.
2 Data Science Laboratory, University of Québec (TÉLUQ), Montréal, QC H2S 3L5, Canada.

Zero-shot counting is a subcategory of Generic Visual Object Counting, which aims to count objects from an arbitrary class in a given image. While few-shot counting relies on delivering exemplars to the model to count similar class objects, zero-shot counting automates the operation for faster processing. This paper proposes a fully automated zero-shot method outperforming both zero-shot and few-shot methods. By exploiting feature maps from a pre-trained detection-based backbone, we introduce a new Visual Embedding Module designed to generate semantic embeddings within object contextual information. These embeddings are then fed to a Self-Attention Matching Module to generate an encoded representation for the head counter. Our proposed method has outperformed recent zero-shot approaches, achieving the best Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) results of 8.89 and 35.83, respectively, on the FSC147 dataset. Additionally, our method demonstrates competitive performance compared to few-shot methods, advancing the capabilities of visual object counting in various industrial applications such as tree counting, wildlife animal counting, and medical applications like blood cell counting.