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

Author(s)
Xu, Beibei
Wang, Wensheng
Falzon, Gregory
Kwan, Paul
Guo, Leifeng
Sun, Zhiguo
Li, Chunlei
Publication Date
2020
Abstract
<p>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.</p>
Citation
International Journal of Remote Sensing, 41(21), p. 8121-8142
ISSN
1366-5901
0143-1161
Link
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International
Title
Livestock classification and counting in quadcopter aerial images using Mask R-CNN
Type of document
Journal Article
Entity Type
Publication

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