Automatic Sheep Behaviour Analysis using Mask R-CNN

Title
Automatic Sheep Behaviour Analysis using Mask R-CNN
Publication Date
2021-11
Author(s)
Xu, Jingsong
Wu, Qiang
Zhang, Jian
Tait, Amy
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5126-088X
Email: ltait2@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:ltait2
Editor
Editor(s): Jun Zhou, Olivier Salvado, Ferdous Sohel, Paulo Borges, and Shilin Wang
Type of document
Conference Publication
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
IEEE
Place of publication
Unites States of America
DOI
10.1109/dicta52665.2021.9647101
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/70566
Abstract

The issue of sheep welfare during live exports has triggered a lot of public concern recently. Extensive research is being carried out to monitor and improve animal welfare. Stocking density can be a critical factor affecting sheep welfare during export and its impact can be monitored through sheep behaviour, position, group dynamics and physiology. In this paper we demonstrate the application of the instance segmentation method Mask R-CNN to support sheep behaviour recognition. As an initial step, two typical behaviours standing and lying are recognized under different group sizes in pens over time. 94%+ mAP was achieved in the validation set demonstrating the effectiveness of the method on identifying sheep behaviours. Further data analysis will provide available space requirements for additional sheep allocation and daily behaviour monitoring to detect abnormal cases which will aim to improve the health and wellbeing of sheep on ships.

Link
Citation
2021 Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), p. 141-146
ISBN
9781665417099
9781665417082
9781665417105
Start page
141
End page
146

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