The Rosette complex is a well studied region of the galactic plane which presents the apparent characteristics of a triggered star forming region. This is however still debated as no strong evidence corroborates this statement. We focused on characterizing the young stellar population in the Rosette to improve our understanding of the processes that regulate the star formation in this region. We propose an original method relying on the joint analysis of the star color and density in the near-infrared. It yielded the identification of 13 clusters, 2 of them being new discoveries. Based on their spectral index from UKIDSS K-band to WISE W3-band, we identified 535 YSO candidates within these cluster boundaries. (2 data files).