LSR-YOLO: A High-Precision, Lightweight Model for Sheep Face Recognition on the Mobile End

Specifically, the ShuffleNetv2 module and Ghost module were used to replace the feature extraction module in the backbone and neck of YOLOv5s to reduce floating-point operations per second (FLOPs) and parameters. In addition, the coordinated attention (CA) module was introduced into the backbone to suppress non-critical information and improve the feature extraction ability of the recognition model. We collected facial images of 63 small-tailed Han sheep to construct a sheep face dataset and further evaluate the proposed method. Compared to YOLOv5s, the FLOPs and parameters of LSR-YOLO decreased by 25.5% and 33.4%, respectively. LSR-YOLO achieved the best performance on the sheep face dataset, and the mAP@0.5 reached 97.8% when the model size was only 9.5 MB. The experimental results show that LSR-YOLO has significant advantages in recognition accuracy and model size. Finally, we integrated LSR-YOLO into mobile devices and further developed a recognition system to achieve real-time recognition. The results show that LSR-YOLO is an effective method for identifying sheep. The method has high recognition accuracy and fast recognition speed, which gives it a high application value in mobile recognition and welfare breeding.