Livestock detection in aerial images using a fully convolutional network

In order to accurately count the number of animals grazing on grassland, we present a livestock detection algorithm using modified versions of U-net and Google Inception-v4 net. This method works well to detect dense and touching instances. We also introduce a dataset for livestock detection in aerial images, consisting of 89 aerial images collected by quadcopter. Each image has resolution of about 3000×4000 pixels, and contains livestock with varying shapes, scales, and orientations.