Effects of Data Augmentation Methods on YOLO v5s: Application of Deep Learning with Pytorch for Individual Cattle Identification

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the YOLO v5s (You Only Look Once) model for the identification of individual cattle in a cattle herd. The model is a popular method for real-time object detection, accuracy, and speed. However, since the videos obtained from the cattle herd consist of free space images, the number of frames in the data is unbalanced. This negatively affects the performance of the YOLOv5 model. First, we investigate the model performance on the unbalanced initial dataset obtained from raw images, then we stabilize the initial dataset using some data augmentation methods and obtain the model performance. Finally, we built the target detection model and achieved excellent model performance with an mAP (mean average precision) of 99.5% on the balanced dataset compared to the model on the unbalanced data (mAP of 95.8%). The experimental results show that YOLO v5s has a good potential for automatic cattle identification, but with the use of data augmentation methods, superior performance can be obtained from the model.