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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly viewed as valuable tools to aid the management of farms. This kind of technology can be particularly useful in the context of extensive cattle farming, as production areas tend to be expansive and animals tend to be more loosely monitored. With the advent of deep learning, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in particular, extracting relevant information from aerial images has become more effective. Despite the technological advancements in drone, imaging and machine learning technologies, the application of UAVs for cattle monitoring is far from being thoroughly studied, with many research gaps still remaining. In this context, the objectives of this study were threefold: (1) to determine the highest possible accuracy that could be achieved in the detection of animals of the Canchim breed, which is visually similar to the Nelore breed (Bos taurus indicus); (2) to determine the ideal ground sample distance (GSD) for animal detection; (3) to determine the most accurate CNN architecture for this specific problem. The experiments involved 1853 images containing 8629 samples of animals, and 15 different CNN architectures were tested. A total of 900 models were trained (15 CNN architectures × 3 spacial resolutions × 2 datasets × 10-fold cross validation), allowing for a deep analysis of the several aspects that impact the detection of cattle using aerial images captured using UAVs. Results revealed that many CNN architectures are robust enough to reliably detect animals in aerial images even under far from ideal conditions, indicating the viability of using UAVs for cattle monitoring.

The use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in agriculture has been growing steadily in the last decade, but their use to monitor and count cattle has been very limited. This article analyses the reasons for this apparent lack of progress, considering both the technical challenges and the difficulties in defining target users who would benefit from a UAS-based system for monitoring cattle. Such an analysis is combined with the findings reported in several investigations dedicated to counting and monitoring wildlife to draw a comprehensive picture on the current situation, to suggest possible solutions to technical issues and to delineate applications that could be useful to both cattle farmers and governments. The text concludes by showing that there are unexplored viable uses for UAS in livestock monitoring, especially in countries like Brazil, where extensive stockbreeding prevails.

The management of livestock in extensive production systems may be challenging, especially in large areas. Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to collect images from the area of interest is quickly becoming a viable alternative, but suitable algorithms for extraction of relevant information from the images are still rare. This article proposes a method for counting cattle which combines a deep learning model for rough animal location, color space manipulation to increase contrast between animals and background, mathematical morphology to isolate the animals and infer the number of individuals in clustered groups, and image matching to take into account image overlap. Using Nelore and Canchim breeds as a case study, the proposed approach yields accuracies over 90% under a wide variety of conditions and backgrounds.

No abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly viewed as valuable tools to aid the management of farms. This kind of technology can be particularly useful in the context of extensive cattle farming, as production areas tend to be expansive and animals tend to be more loosely monitored. With the advent of deep learning, and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in particular, extracting relevant information from aerial images has become more effective. Despite the technological advancements in drone, imaging and machine learning technologies, the application of UAVs for cattle monitoring is far from being thoroughly studied, with many research gaps still remaining. In this context, the objectives of this study were threefold: 1) to determine the highest possible accuracy that could be achieved in the detection of animals of the Canchim breed, which is visually similar to the Nelore breed (\textit{Bos taurus indicus}); 2) to determine the ideal Ground Sample Distance (GSD) for animal detection; 3) to determine the most accurate CNN architecture for this specific problem. The experiments involved 1,853 images containing 8,629 samples of animals, and 15 different CNN architectures were tested. A total of 900 models were trained (15 CNN architectures * 3 spacial resolutions * 2 datasets * 10-fold cross validation), allowing for a deep analysis of the several aspects that impact the detection of cattle using aerial images captured using UAVs. Results revealed that many CNN architectures are robust enough to reliably detect animals in aerial images even under far from ideal conditions, indicating the viability of using UAVs for cattle monitoring.

The evolution in imaging technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms, coupled with improvements in UAV technology, has enabled the use of unmanned aircraft in a wide range of applications. The feasibility of this kind of approach for cattle monitoring has been demonstrated by several studies, but practical use is still challenging due to the particular characteristics of this application, such as the need to track mobile targets and the extensive areas that need to be covered in most cases. The objective of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using a tilted angle to increase the area covered by each image. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (Xception architecture) were used to generate the models for animal detection. Three experiments were carried out: (1) five different sizes for the input images were tested to determine which yields the highest accuracies; (2) detection accuracies were calculated for different distances between animals and sensor, in order to determine how distance influences detectability; and (3) animals that were completely missed by the detection process were individually identified and the cause for those errors were determined, revealing some potential topics for further research. Experimental results indicate that oblique images can be successfully used under certain conditions, but some practical limitations need to be addressed in order to make this approach appealing.

 Over the last few years, considerable effort has been spent by Embrapa in the construction of a plant disease database representative enough for the development of effective methods for automatic plant disease detection and recognition. In October of 2016, this database, called PDDB, had 2326 images of 171 diseases and other disorders affecting 21 plant species. PDDB size, although considerable, is not enough to allow the use of powerful techniques such as deep learning. In order to increase its size, each image was subdivided according to certain criteria, increasing the number of images to 46,513. Both the original (PDDB) and subdivided (XDB) databases are now being made freely available for academic research purposes, thus supporting new studies and contributing to speed up the advances in the area. Both collections are expected to grow continuously in order to expand their reach. PDDB and XDB can be accessed in the link https://www.digipathosrep.cnptia.embrapa.br/.