Utilizing EfficientNet for sheep breed identification in low-resolution images

Automatically recognizing sheep breeds is highly valuable for the sheep farming industry, allowing farmers to pinpoint their specific business needs. Accurately distinguishing between sheep breeds poses a challenge for numerous farmers with limited expertise. Although biometric-based identification offers a feasible solution, its application becomes impractical when assessing large numbers of sheep in real-time. Therefore, the implementation of an automatic sheep classification model that can replicate the breed identification skills of a sheep breed expert can come in handy. This would be particularly beneficial for novice farmers who could utilize handheld devices for breed classification. To address this objective, we propose employing a convolutional neural network (CNN) model capable of rapidly and accurately identifying sheep breeds from low-resolution images. Our experiment utilized a dataset of 1680 facial images representing four distinct sheep breeds. We conducted experiments on the dataset using various EfficientNet models and found that EfficientNetB5 achieved the highest performance with 97.62 % accuracy on a 10 % test split. The classification model we developed has the potential to assist sheep farmers in efficiently distinguishing between different breeds, facilitating more precise assessments and sector-specific classification for various businesses within the industry.