Vision-Based Module for Herding with a Sheepdog Robot

[EN] : Livestock farming is assisted more and more by technological solutions, such as robots. One of the main problems for shepherds is the control and care of livestock in areas difficult to access where grazing animals are attacked by predators such as the Iberian wolf in the northwest of the Ibe...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Riego Del Castillo, Virginia, Sánchez González, Lidia, Campazas Vega, Adrián, Strisciuglio, Nicola
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universidad de León
Repositorio:BULERIA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de León
OAI Identifier:oai:buleria.unileon.es:10612/20410
Acceso en línea:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/14/5321
https://hdl.handle.net/10612/20410
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Cibernética
Computer vision
Threat identification
Wolf recognition
Herding
Sheepdog robots
Precision livestock farming
1207.03 Cibernética
1203.04 Inteligencia Artificial
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] : Livestock farming is assisted more and more by technological solutions, such as robots. One of the main problems for shepherds is the control and care of livestock in areas difficult to access where grazing animals are attacked by predators such as the Iberian wolf in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. In this paper, we propose a system to automatically generate benchmarks of animal images of different species from iNaturalist API, which is coupled with a vision-based module that allows us to automatically detect predators and distinguish them from other animals. We tested multiple existing object detection models to determine the best one in terms of efficiency and speed, as it is conceived for real-time environments. YOLOv5m achieves the best performance as it can process 64 FPS, achieving an mAP (with IoU of 50%) of 99.49% for a dataset where wolves (predator) or dogs (prey) have to be detected and distinguished. This result meets the requirements of pasture-based livestock farms.