A novel approach is presented to locate dense crowd of people in a network of fixed cameras given the severely degraded background subtracted silhouettes. The problem is formulated as a sparsity constrained inverse problem using an adaptive dictionary constructed on- line. The framework has no constraint on the number of cameras neither on the surface to be monitored. Even with a single camera, partially occluded and grouped people are correctly detected and segmented. Qualitative results are presented in indoor and outdoor scenes.