Use Vision AI for Accurate Livestock Monitoring at Scale

If you own, manage or operate a livestock operation, counting your animals and monitoring the movement of your livestock is a critical part of your business. See how Vision AI can help improve the process. Due to customer privacy, the videos in this post are for demonstration purposes only.  

Counting sheep to fall asleep is something most of us have tried, but if you own, manage or operate a livestock operation, counting your animals and monitoring the movement of your livestock is a critical part of your business. Take a look at the video below. Do you think you can accurately count how many sheep are running down the trail in real time? 

Counting sheep using computer vision seems like it should be a straightforward process, however using the computer vision tools of yesterday brought with it layers of technical complexity that required a team of data scientists to navigate. Fortunately for the livestock and agriculture industry, we here at Plainsight have developed a computer vision solution that simplifies these types of vision AI applications, while also increasing the accuracy of the count! 

Most object counting systems like this require several components. 

1. An accurate object detection model to classify and localize where the object is inside each frame of the video. This usually requires training a custom model on a labeled dataset.
2. An object tracking algorithm to track where each individual object moves to from frame-to-frame. 
3. A registration zone where object detection and tracking is applied when objects enter the camera view.
4. A counting line that triggers the object count as each crosses it.
5. Tracking the movement direction across the counting line can also be important. An object that moves backward can be counted multiple times if you do not account for this possibility. 
6. A deregistration zone where object detection and tracking can be confidently removed after the counting has happened.

In this video, the sheep enter the camera view at the bottom left in the registration zone and object detection and tracking is applied. When they walk across the line in the middle, we count them. After being counted, we can safely stop the detection and tracking of those specific sheep. 

Building an end-to-end accurate detection model and object tracking system can be a difficult and time consuming task. We’ve made building vision AI applications like this easy and accessible. See how you can get started at Plainsight.ai.

A longer livestock counting example can be found below: