Obtaining animal regions and the relative position relationship of animals in the scene is conducive to further studying animal habits, which is of great significance for smart animal farming. However, the complex breeding environment still makes detection difficult. To address the problems of poor target segmentation effects and the weak generalization ability of existing semantic segmentation models in complex scenes, a semantic segmentation model based on an improved DeepLabV3+ network (Imp-DeepLabV3+) was proposed. Firstly, the backbone network of the DeepLabV3+ model was replaced by MobileNetV2 to enhance the feature extraction capability of the model. Then, the layer-by-layer feature fusion method was adopted in the Decoder stage to integrate high-level semantic feature information with low-level high-resolution feature information at multi-scale to achieve more precise up-sampling operation. Finally, the SENet module was further introduced into the network to enhance information interaction after feature fusion and improve the segmentation precision of the model under complex datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the Imp-DeepLabV3+ model achieved a high pixel accuracy (PA) of 99.4%, a mean pixel accuracy (MPA) of 98.1%, and a mean intersection over union (MIoU) of 96.8%. Compared to the original DeepLabV3+ model, the segmentation performance of the improved model significantly improved. Moreover, the overall segmentation performance of the Imp-DeepLabV3+ model surpassed that of other commonly used semantic segmentation models, such as Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs), Lite Reduced Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (LR-ASPP), and U-Net. Therefore, this study can be applied to the field of scene segmentation and is conducive to further analyzing individual information and promoting the development of intelligent animal farming.
Keywords: DeepLabV3+; attention mechanisms; cattle; segmentation.