Automatic Face Detection of Farm Images Based on an Enhanced Lightweight Deep Learning Model

Abstract

In the realm of precise management, artificial intelligence has garnered significant attention and adoption, particularly within the domain of smart agriculture. In modern animal husbandry, animal face detection is conducive to individual identification, expression detection and behavior analysis of animals, and this technological advancement holds immense importance in fostering the advancement of intelligent farming practices. In order to solve the challenge of face detection caused by similar appearance features (color, texture, etc.) and no obvious feature differences between the solid-color goats and sheep in the natural environment, this research introduces a novel approach for face detection by combining the capabilities of YOLOv5 and a convolutional block attention module (CBAM). First, datasets of goats and sheep with different angles, scales and densities were constructed. Second, the basic framework of YOLOv5 was used for object detection. To address the obstacle posed by the limited presence of distinguishing features on the faces of goats and sheep, this study aims to overcome the challenge of extracting informative facial characteristics. The CBAM block was introduced to construct the YOLOv5-CBAM model to improve the feature extraction ability. Finally, 2412 images were selected and divided into training set and verification set according to 8:1. The experimental results of this dataset show that the proposed YOLOv5-CBAM model yielded remarkable results with a precision rate of 0.970, a recall rate of 0.890, a mAP@0.5 score of 0.935, an frames per second (FPS) of 140.845, and a model size of 14.680[Formula: see text]MB. In comparison to other approaches such as Faster R-CNN, SSD, YOLOv3, and YOLOv5, the proposed model demonstrated superior performance in some aspects. In addition, it excelled in both lightweight design and overall effectiveness, and it is well-suited for real-time detection of animal faces in real-world farming settings, ensuring efficient identification and monitoring of animals within practical agricultural environments.