Research on the Behavior Recognition of Beef Cattle Based on the Improved Lightweight CBR-YOLO Model Based on YOLOv8 in Multi-Scene Weather

Animals (Basel). 2024 Sep 27;14(19):2800. doi: 10.3390/ani14192800.

Abstract

In modern animal husbandry, intelligent digital farming has become the key to improve production efficiency. This paper introduces a model based on improved YOLOv8, Cattle Behavior Recognition-YOLO (CBR-YOLO), which aims to accurately identify the behavior of cattle. We not only generate a variety of weather conditions, but also introduce multi-target detection technology to achieve comprehensive monitoring of cattle and their status. We introduce Inner-MPDIoU Loss and we have innovatively designed the Multi-Convolutional Focused Pyramid module to explore and learn in depth the detailed features of cattle in different states. Meanwhile, the Lightweight Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Detection Head module is proposed to take advantage of deep convolution, achieving a lightweight network architecture and effectively reducing redundant information. Experimental results prove that our method achieves an average accuracy of 90.2% with a reduction of 3.9 G floating-point numbers, an increase of 7.4%, significantly better than 12 kinds of SOTA object detection models. By deploying our approach on monitoring computers on farms, we expect to advance the development of automated cattle monitoring systems to improve animal welfare and farm management.

Keywords: LMFD; MCFP; YOLOv8; behavior recognition; cattle behavior; lightweight model.