EmbeddedPigDet—Fast and Accurate Pig Detection for Embedded Board Implementations

Abstract

Automated pig monitoring is an important issue in the surveillance environment of a pig farm. For a large-scale pig farm in particular, practical issues such as monitoring cost should be considered but such consideration based on low-cost embedded boards has not yet been reported. Since low-cost embedded boards have more limited computing power than typical PCs and have tradeoffs between execution speed and accuracy, achieving fast and accurate detection of individual pigs for “on-device” pig monitoring applications is very challenging. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method for the fast detection of individual pigs by reducing the computational workload of 3 × 3 convolution in widely-used, deep learning-based object detectors. Then, in order to recover the accuracy of the “light-weight” deep learning-based object detector, we generate a three-channel composite image as its input image, through “simple” image preprocessing techniques. Our experimental results on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano embedded board show that the proposed method can improve the integrated performance of both execution speed and accuracy of widely-used, deep learning-based object detectors, by a factor of up to 8.7.