Livestock classification and counting in quadcopter aerial images using Mask R-CNN

Title
Livestock classification and counting in quadcopter aerial images using Mask R-CNN
Publication Date
2020
Author(s)
Xu, Beibei
Wang, Wensheng
Falzon, Gregory
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1989-9357
Email: gfalzon2@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:gfalzon2
Kwan, Paul
Guo, Leifeng
Sun, Zhiguo
Li, Chunlei
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Place of publication
United Kingdom
DOI
10.1080/01431161.2020.1734245
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/58418
Abstract

Quadcopters equipped with machine learning vision systems are bound to become an essential technique for precision agriculture applications in pastures in the near future. This paper presents a low-cost approach for livestock counting jointly with classification and semantic segmentation which provide the potential of biometrics and welfare monitoring in animals in real time. The method used in the paper adopts the state-of-the-art deep-learning technique known as Mask R-CNN for feature extraction and training in the images captured by quadcopters. Key parameters such as IoU (Intersection over Union) threshold, the quantity of the training data and the effect the proposed system performs on various densities have been evaluated to optimize the model. A real pasture surveillance dataset is used to evaluate the proposed method and experimental results show that our proposed system can accurately classify the livestock with an accuracy of 96% and estimate the number of cattle and sheep to within 92% of the visual ground truth, presenting competitive advantages of the approach feasible for monitoring the livestock.

Link
Citation
International Journal of Remote Sensing, 41(21), p. 8121-8142
ISSN
1366-5901
0143-1161
Start page
8121
End page
8142
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International

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