Cattle Detection Occlusion Problem

The management of cattle over a huge area is still a challenging problem in the farming sector. With evolution in technology, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with consumer level digital cameras are becoming a popular alternative to manual animal censuses for livestock estimation since they are less risky and expensive.This paper evaluated and compared the cutting-edge object detection algorithms, YOLOv7,RetinaNet with ResNet50 backbone, RetinaNet with EfficientNet and mask RCNN. It aims to improve the occlusion problem that is to detect hidden cattle from a huge dataset captured by drones using deep learning algorithms for accurate cattle detection. Experimental results showed YOLOv7 was superior with precision of 0.612 when compared to the other two algorithms. The proposed method proved superior to the usual competing algorithms for cow face detection, especially in very difficult cases.