Efficient Pig Counting in Crowds with Keypoints Tracking and Spatial-aware Temporal Response Filtering

Pig counting is a crucial task for large-scale pig farming. Pigs are usually visually counted by human. But this process is very time-consuming and error-prone. Few studies in literature developed automated pig counting method. The existing works only focused on pig counting using single image, and its level of accuracy faced challenges due to pig movements, occlusion and overlapping. Especially, the field of view of a single image is very limited, and could not meet the needs of pig counting for large pig grouping houses. Towards addressing these challenges, we presented a real-time automated pig counting system in crowds using only one monocular fisheye camera with an inspection robot. Our system showed that it achieved performance superior to human. Our pipeline began with a novel bottom-up pig detection algorithm to avoid false negatives due to overlapping, occlusion and deformable pig shapes. This detection included a deep convolution neural network (CNN) for pig body part keypoints detection and the keypoints association method to identify individual pigs. It then employed an efficient on-line tracking method to associate pigs across image frames. Finally, pig counts were estimated by a novel spatial-aware temporal response filtering (STRF) method to suppress false positives caused by pig or camera movements or tracking failures. The whole pipeline has been deployed in an edge computing device, and demonstrated the effectiveness.