Knowing the number of pigs on a large-scale pig farm is an important issue for efficient farm management. However, counting the number of pigs accurately is difficult for humans because pigs do not obediently stop or slow down for counting. In this study, we propose a camera-based automatic method to count the number of pigs passing through a counting zone. That is, using a camera in a hallway, our deep-learning-based video object detection and tracking method analyzes video streams and counts the number of pigs passing through the counting zone. Furthermore, to execute the counting method in real time on a low-cost embedded board, we consider the tradeoff between accuracy and execution time, which has not yet been reported for pig counting. Our experimental results on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano embedded board show that this "light-weight" method is effective for counting the passing-through pigs, in terms of both accuracy (i.e., 99.44%) and execution time (i.e., real-time execution), even when some pigs pass through the counting zone back and forth.
Keywords: agriculture IT; computer vision; convolutional neural network; pig counting; video object detection and tracking.