Sustainable Self-Training Pig Detection System with Augmented Single Labeled Target Data for Solving Domain Shift Problem

Abstract

As global pork consumption rises, livestock farms increasingly adopt deep learning-based automated monitoring systems for efficient pigsty management. Typically, a system applies a pre-trained model on a source domain to a target domain. However, real pigsty environments differ significantly from existing public datasets regarding lighting conditions, camera angles, and animal density. These discrepancies result in a substantial domain shift, leading to severe performance degradation. Additionally, due to variations in the structure of pigsties, pig breeds, and sizes across farms, it is practically challenging to develop a single generalized model that can be applied to all environments. Overcoming this limitation through large-scale labeling presents considerable burdens in terms of time and cost. To address the degradation issue, this study proposes a self-training-based domain adaptation method that utilizes a single label on target (SLOT) sample from the target domain, a genetic algorithm (GA)-based data augmentation search (DAS) designed explicitly for SLOT data to optimize the augmentation parameters, and a super-low-threshold strategy to include low-confidence-scored pseudo-labels during self-training. The proposed system consists of the following three modules: (1) data collection module; (2) preprocessing module that selects key frames and extracts SLOT data; and (3) domain-adaptive pig detection module that applies DAS to SLOT data to generate optimized augmented data, which are used to train the base model. Then, the trained base model is improved through self-training, where a super-low threshold is applied to filter pseudo-labels. The experimental results show that the proposed system significantly improved the average precision (AP) from 36.86 to 90.62 under domain shift conditions, which achieved a performance close to fully supervised learning while relying solely on SLOT data. The proposed system maintained a robust detection performance across various pig-farming environments and demonstrated stable performance under domain shift conditions, validating its feasibility for real-world applications.

Keywords

• monitoring system
• object detection
• domain shift
• data augmentation
• genetic algorithm
• self-training