SheepInst: A High-Performance Instance Segmentation of Sheep Images Based on Deep Learning

Sheep detection and segmentation will play a crucial role in promoting the implementation of precision livestock farming in the future. In sheep farms, the characteristics of sheep that have the tendency to congregate and irregular contours cause difficulties for computer vision tasks, such as individual identification, behavior recognition, and weight estimation of sheep. Sheep instance segmentation is one of the methods that can mitigate the difficulties associated with locating and extracting different individuals from the same category. To improve the accuracy of extracting individual sheep locations and contours in the case of multiple sheep overlap, this paper proposed two-stage sheep instance segmentation SheepInst based on the Mask R-CNN framework, more specifically, RefineMask. Firstly, an improved backbone network ConvNeXt-E was proposed to extract sheep features. Secondly, we improved the structure of the two-stage object detector Dynamic R-CNN to precisely locate highly overlapping sheep. Finally, we enhanced the segmentation network of RefineMask by adding spatial attention modules to accurately segment irregular contours of sheep. SheepInst achieves 89.1%, 91.3%, and 79.5% in box AP, mask AP, and boundary AP metric on the test set, respectively. The extensive experiments show that SheepInst is more suitable for sheep instance segmentation and has excellent performance.