SAM3-Assisted Training of Lightweight YOLO Models for Precision Pig Farming

Deep learning-based object detection has revolutionized Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), yet a critical barrier remains: high-performance Foundation Models (such as SAM 3) are too computationally intensive for edge deployment, while lightweight models (like YOLO) require prohibitive manual annotation efforts. This work proposes a fully automated knowledge distillation pipeline that leverages the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) to generate zero-shot pseudo-labels for training efficient YOLOv8 detectors. By treating SAM 3 as an offline auto-annotator, we eliminate the manual labeling bottleneck, producing models capable of real-time inference on resource-constrained hardware. We systematically evaluate this approach on the PigLife dataset, comparing SAM 3-supervised models against human-annotated baselines. Results demonstrate that a SAM 3-trained YOLOv8m achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 79.4% without human intervention, while reducing inference latency by approximately 200× compared to the teacher model. Furthermore, stratified analysis reveals that in low-occlusion scenarios, the automated pipeline achieves detection rates comparable to human benchmarks (AP50 > 99%). These findings indicate that foundation models can serve as effective, zero-annotation-cost supervisors, enabling scalable edge computing solutions for smart agriculture.