Small Target Ewe Behavior Recognition Based on ELFN-YOLO

In response to the poor performance of long-distance small target recognition tasks and real-time intelligent monitoring, this paper proposes a deep learning-based recognition method aimed at improving the ability to recognize and monitor various behaviors of captive ewes. Additionally, we have developed a system platform based on ELFN-YOLO to monitor the behaviors of ewes. ELFN-YOLO enhances the overall performance of the model by combining ELFN with the attention mechanism CBAM. ELFN strengthens multiple layers with fewer parameters, while the attention mechanism further emphasizes the channel information interaction based on ELFN. It also improves the ability of ELFN to extract spatial information in small target occlusion scenarios, leading to better recognition results. The proposed ELFN-YOLO achieved an accuracy of 92.5%, an F1 score of 92.5%, and a mAP@0.5 of 94.7% on the ewe behavior dataset built in commercial farms, which outperformed YOLOv7-Tiny by 1.5%, 0.8%, and 0.7% in terms of accuracy, F1 score, and mAP@0.5, respectively. It also outperformed other baseline models such as Faster R-CNN, YOLOv4-Tiny, and YOLOv5s. The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods in scenarios involving multi-scale detection of small objects. The proposed method is of significant importance for strengthening animal welfare and ewe management, and it provides valuable data support for subsequent tracking algorithms to monitor the activity status of ewes.