Lightweight Real-Time Detection Model for Multi-Sheep Abnormal Behaviour Based on Yolov7-Tiny

Animal behaviour can reflect the health and physiological stage of the animal. Animal behaviour recognition is a vital part of automated farming systems. Although image-based deep learning algorithms can accurately identify animal behaviour, the lack of data on animal abnormal behaviour makes the practical deployment of models of limited significance. At the same time, the ageing of farm monitoring equipment is also a key factor hindering automated farming. This paper constructs a sheep abnormal behaviour dataset ABSB to address these issues and proposes a lightweight real-time multi-sheep abnormal behaviour detection model YOLOv7-Lrab based on the YOLOv7-tiny network. The abnormal behaviour dataset includes four normal behaviours: standing, lying, eating and drinking, and three abnormal behaviours: lameness, attack and death. In the proposed YOLOv7-Lrab model, the small target detection layer, Coordinate attention module, SPD-Conv and Mobileone module are added compared to YOLOv7-tiny. The experimental results show that with a 7:3 ratio of training data to test data, 96.5% recognition accuracy and 95.5% recall can be achieved, and the model size is only 4.5MB with fps of 156. The model is compressed to a minimum without loss of accuracy, providing a new idea for deploying deep learning model in practical application scenarios.