SCS-YOLOv5s: A cattle detection and counting method for complex breeding environment

Cattle detection and counting is one of the most important topics in the development of modern agriculture and animal husbandry. The traditional manual monitoring methods are inefficient and constrained by factors such as site. To solve the above problems, a SCS-YOLOv5 cattle detection and counting model for complex breeding scenarios is proposed. The original SPPF module is replaced in the YOLOv5 backbone network with a CSP structured SPPFCSPC. A CA (Coordinate Attention) mechanism is added to the neck network, as well as the SC (Standard Convolution) of the Neck network is replaced with a light convolution GSConv and Slim Neck is introduced, and training strategies such as multi-scale training are also employed. The experimental results show that the proposed method enhances the feature extraction ability and feature fusion ability, balances the localization accuracy and detection speed, and improves the use effect in real farming scenarios. The Precision of the improved network model is improved from 93.2% to 95.5%, mAP@0.5 is improved from 94.5% to 95.2%, the RMSE is reduced by about 0.03, and the FPS reaches 88. Compared with other mainstream algorithms, the comprehensive performance of SCS-YOLOv5 s is in a leading position, with fewer missed and false detections, and the strong robustness and generalization ability of this model are proved on multi-category public datasets. Applying the improvement ideas in this paper to YOLOv8 s also yields an increase in accuracy. The improved method in this study can greatly improve the accuracy of cattle detection and counting in complex environments, and has good real-time performance, so as to provide technical support for large-scale cattle breeding.