TR-YOLO: A pig detection network based on YOLO V5n by combining self attention mechanism and large convolutional kernel

Under the highly valued environment of intelligent breeding, rapid and accurate detection of pigs in the breeding process can scientifically monitor the health of pigs and improve the welfare level of pigs. At present, the methods of live pig detection cannot complete the detection task in real time and accurately, so a pig detection model named TR-YOLO is proposed. Using cameras to collect data at the pig breeding site in Rongchang District, Chongqing City, LabelImg software is used to mark the position of pigs in the image, and data augmentation methods are used to expand the data samples, thus constructing a pig dataset. The lightweight YOLOv5n is selected as the baseline detection model. In order to complete the pig detection task more accurately, a C3DW module constructed by depth wise separable convolution with large convolution kernels is used to replace the C3 module in YOLOv5n, which enhances the receptive field of the whole detection model; a C3TR module constructed by Transformer structure is used to extract more refined global feature information. Contrast with the baseline model YOLOv5n, the new detection model does not increase additional computational load, and improves the accuracy of detection by 1.6 percentage points. Compared with other lightweight detection models, the new detection model has corresponding advantages in terms of parameter quantity, computational load, detection accuracy and so on. It can detect pigs in feeding more accurately while satisfying the real-time performance of target detection, providing an effective method for live monitoring and analysis of pigs at the production site.