Abstract
Trap-neuter-return (TNR) has become an effective solution to reduce the prevalence of stray animals. Due to the non-culling policy for stray cats and dogs since 2017, there is a great demand for the sterilization of cats and dogs in Taiwan. In 2020, Heart of Taiwan Animal Care (HOTAC) had more than 32,000 cases of neutered cats and dogs. HOTAC needs to take pictures to record the ears and excised organs of each neutered cat or dog from different veterinary hospitals. The correctness of the archived medical photos and the different shooting and imaging angles from different veterinary hospitals must be carefully reviewed by human professionals. To reduce the cost of manual review, Yolo’s ensemble learning based on deep learning and a majority voting system can effectively identify TNR surgical images, save 80% of the labor force, and its average accuracy (mAP) exceeds 90%. The best feature extraction based on the Yolo model is Yolov4, whose mAP reaches 91.99%, and the result is integrated into the voting classification. Experimental results show that compared with the previous manual work, it can decrease the workload by more than 80%.
Highlights
The issue of stray dogs and cats has become a global concern because of animal welfare and public hygiene; stray dogs and cats have an impact on native wildlife through predation, competition, and disease transmission [1,2]
We found that the application of deep learning has not been used in the neutered operation of TNR, but our experiments prove that the integrated algorithms of deep learning and majority voting methods have a good recognition rate for neutered operation images
The best feature extraction by the You Only Look Once” (Yolo)-based model is Yolov4, whose mean average precision (mAP) reached 91.99%, and the majority voting system reached the accuracy of 85%, so it can save more than 86% of manual detection time
Summary
The issue of stray dogs and cats has become a global concern because of animal welfare and public hygiene; stray dogs and cats have an impact on native wildlife through predation, competition, and disease transmission [1,2]. To reduce the number of stray animals, people first impound them into shelters; more than half of impounded animals are euthanized due to shelter crowding, infectious disease, and feral behavior [3]. TNR, a non-lethal alternative to control the number of stray cats, can be traced back to the 1950s in England. In 2020, the HTACA alone had around 32,000 neutered cases of cats and dogs. Every dog or cat neutered from veterinary hospitals must be photographed, including its ears and excised organs as the corresponding voucher for each dog or cat surgery. The problem is that the up to 60,000 archived medical treatment photos from different veterinary hospitals and different shooting imaging angles must be accurate. Since there is no special camera equipment or photography specifications for each hospital, images have to be checked manually and reviewed carefully by a professional human’s eye
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