In order to realize the real-time classification and detection of mutton multi-part, this paper proposes a mutton multi-part classification and detection method based on the Swin-Transformer. First, image augmentation techniques are adopted to increase the sample size of the sheep thoracic vertebrae and scapulae to overcome the problems of long-tailed distribution and non-equilibrium of the dataset. Then, the performances of three structural variants of the Swin-Transformer (Swin-T, Swin-B, and Swin-S) are compared through transfer learning, and the optimal model is obtained. On this basis, the robustness, generalization, and anti-occlusion abilities of the model are tested and analyzed using the significant multiscale features of the lumbar vertebrae and thoracic vertebrae, by simulating different lighting environments and occlusion scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, the model is compared with five methods commonly used in object detection tasks, namely Sparser-CNN, YoloV5, RetinaNet, CenterNet, and HRNet, and its real-time performance is tested under the following pixel resolutions: 576 × 576, 672 × 672, and 768 × 768. The results show that the proposed method achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.943, while the mAP for the robustness, generalization, and anti-occlusion tests are 0.913, 0.857, and 0.845, respectively. Moreover, the model outperforms the five aforementioned methods, with mAP values that are higher by 0.009, 0.027, 0.041, 0.050, and 0.113, respectively. The average processing time of a single image with this model is 0.25 s, which meets the production line requirements. In summary, this study presents an efficient and intelligent mutton multi-part classification and detection method, which can provide technical support for the automatic sorting of mutton as well as for the processing of other livestock meat.
Keywords: classification; computer vision; deep learning; detection; livestock meat; mutton processing.