Dataset for herding and predator detection with the use of robots

Abstract

Precision livestock farming involves the use of new technologies to improve the performance of farms with low profit margins. Since extensive livestock farming is demanding work requiring continuous supervision, it has not improved as drastically as agriculture. Furthermore, nowadays the world is more aware of the importance of respecting biodiversity and reducing the carbon footprint, for which sustainable animal production is recommended. This is the case of small livestock farms, generally located in unpopulated areas and with difficult generational replacement, due to the tasks involved. The use of robots and other devices equipped with intelligent systems can be useful to the farmer in his daily work. In this way, livestock, specifically flocks of sheep, can be monitored and the presence of potential predators such as the wolf identified. Encountering said predator can be avoided by moving the herd to other, safer pasture areas. This work presents a dataset that contains images and videos that allow detecting, classifying and analyzing flocks of sheep and one of their usual predators, wolves. The dataset includes videos of flocks in different locations, with different lighting conditions and different types of sheep. In addition, it contains images of wolves in natural spaces, which are not usually included in the most common datasets used in computer vision. This dataset can be very useful for the work being carried out in extensive precision livestock farming, to develop intelligent systems, such as a robot, that allow autonomous monitoring and control of a herd. Furthermore, it can be used to analyze animal behavior in the presence of a robot, since some of the images have been acquired with the cameras of a quadruped robot.This dataset has been split into three different Zenodo repositories due to its size. Images of sheep can be downloaded from https://zenodo.org/records/11313800 The images of classes ‘Person’, ‘Wolf’ and the depth maps for simulation are publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/11313966 YOLO annotations are at https://zenodo.org/records/11313165

Keywords

• Semantic segmentation
• Precision livestock farming
• Animal identification
• Wolf presence detection