Vision Intelligence for Smart Sheep Farming: Applying Ensemble Learning to Detect Sheep Breeds

The ability to automatically recognize sheep breeds holds significant value for the sheep industry. Sheep farmers often require breed identification to assess the commercial worth of their flocks. However, many farmers specifically the novice one encounter difficulties in accurately identifying sheep breeds without experts in the field. Therefore, there is a need for autonomous approaches that can effectively and precisely replicate the breed identification skills of a sheep breed expert while functioning within a farm environment, thus providing considerable benefits the industry-specific to the novice farmers in the industry. To achieve this objective, we suggest utilizing a model based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which can rapidly and efficiently identify the type of sheep based on their facial features. This approach offers a cost-effective solution. To conduct our experiment, we utilized a dataset consisting of 1680 facial images which represented four distinct sheep breeds. This paper proposes an ensemble method that combines Xception, VGG16, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, and DenseNet121 models. During the transfer learning using this pre-trained model, we applied several optimizers and loss functions and chose the best combinations out of them. This classification model has the potential to aid sheep farmers in precisely and efficiently distinguishing between various breeds, enabling more precise assessments of sector-specific classification for different businesses. (c) 2023 The Authors. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).