A review of deep learning techniques for detecting animals in aerial and satellite images

Deep learning is an effective machine learning method that in recent years has been successfully applied to detect and monitor species population in remotely sensed data. This study aims to provide a systematic literature review of current applications of deep learning methods for animal detection in aerial and satellite images. We categorized methods in collated publications into image level, point level, bounding-box level, instance segmentation level, and specific information level. The statistical results show that YOLO, Faster R-CNN, U-Net and ResNet are the most used neural network structures. The main challenges associated with the use of these deep learning methods are imbalanced datasets, small samples, small objects, image annotation methods, image background, animal counting, model accuracy assessment, and uncertainty estimation. We explored possible solutions include the selection of sample annotation methods, optimizing positive or negative samples, using weakly and self- supervised learning methods, selecting or developing more suitable network structures. Future research trends we identified are video-based detection, very high-resolution satellite image-based detection, multiple species detection, new annotation methods, and the development of specialized network structures and large foundation models. We discussed existing research attempts as well as personal perspectives on these possible solutions and future trends

The groundbreaking impact of digitalization and artificial intelligence in sheep farming

The integration of digitalization and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has marked the onset of a new era of efficient sheep farming in multiple aspects ranging from the general well-being of sheep to advanced web-based management applications. The resultant improvement in sheep health and consequently better farming yield has already started to benefit both farmers and veterinarians. The predictive analytical models embedded with machine learning (giving sense to machines) has helped better decision-making and has enabled farmers to derive most out of their farms. This is evident in the ability of farmers to remotely monitor livestock health by wearable devices that keep track of animal vital signs and behaviour. Additionally, veterinarians now employ advanced AI-based diagnostics for efficient parasite detection and control. Overall, digitalization and AI have completely transformed traditional farming practices in livestock animals. However, there is a pressing need to optimize digital sheep farming, allowing sheep farmers to appreciate and adopt these innovative systems. To fill this gap, this review aims to provide available digital and AI-based systems designed to aid precision farming of sheep, offering an up-to-date understanding on the subject. Various contemporary techniques, such as sky shepherding, virtual fencing, advanced parasite detection, automated counting and behaviour tracking, anomaly detection, precision nutrition, breeding support, and several mobile-based management applications are currently being utilized in sheep farms and appear to be promising. Although artificial intelligence and machine learning may represent key features in the sustainable development of sheep farming, they present numerous challenges in application

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Sheep management and production enhancement are difficult for farmers due to the lack of dynamic response and poor welfare of the sheep. Poor welfare needs to be mitigated, and each farm must receive an expert-level assessment of critical importance. To mitigate poor welfare, researchers have conducted machine learning-based studies to automate the sheep health behavior monitoring process instead of using manual assessment. However, failure to recognize some sheep health behaviors degrades the performance of the model. In addition, behavior challenges, parameters, and analysis must be considered when conducting a study based on machine learning. In this paper, we discuss the different challenges: what are the parameters of the sheep health behaviors, and how to analyze the sheep health behaviors for automated machine learning systems to be helpful in the long term? The hypothesis is based on a different review of the literature of precision-based animal welfare monitoring systems with the potential to improve management and production.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

SIMCO: SIMilarity-based object COunting

We present SIMCO, the first agnostic multi-class object counting approach. SIMCO starts by detecting foreground objects through a novel Mask RCNN-based architecture trained beforehand (just once) on a brand-new synthetic 2D shape dataset, InShape; the idea is to highlight every object resembling a primitive 2D shape (circle, square, rectangle, etc.). Each object detected is described by a low-dimensional embedding, obtained from a novel similarity-based head branch; this latter implements a triplet loss, encouraging similar objects (same 2D shape + color and scale) to map close. Subsequently, SIMCO uses this embedding for clustering, so that different types of objects can emerge and be counted, making SIMCO the very first multi-class unsupervised counter. Experiments show that SIMCO provides state-of-the-art scores on counting benchmarks and that it can also help in many challenging image understanding tasks

CoupleNet: Coupling Global Structure with Local Parts for Object Detection

The region-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) detectors such as Faster R-CNN or R-FCN have already shown promising results for object detection by combining the region proposal subnetwork and the classification subnetwork together. Although R-FCN has achieved higher detection speed while keeping the detection performance, the global structure information is ignored by the position-sensitive score maps. To fully explore the local and global properties, in this paper, we propose a novel fully convolutional network, named as CoupleNet, to couple the global structure with local parts for object detection. Specifically, the object proposals obtained by the Region Proposal Network (RPN) are fed into the the coupling module which consists of two branches. One branch adopts the position-sensitive RoI (PSRoI) pooling to capture the local part information of the object, while the other employs the RoI pooling to encode the global and context information. Next, we design different coupling strategies and normalization ways to make full use of the complementary advantages between the global and local branches. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We achieve state-of-the-art results on all three challenging datasets, i.e. a mAP of 82.7% on VOC07, 80.4% on VOC12, and 34.4% on COCO. Codes will be made publicly available.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 201