Attention-Guided Edge-Optimized Network for Real-Time Detection and Counting of Pre-Weaning Piglets in Farrowing Crates

Accurate, real-time, and cost-effective detection and counting of pre-weaning piglets are critical for improving piglet survival rates. However, achieving this remains technically challenging due to high computational demands, frequent occlusion, social behaviors, and cluttered backgrounds in commercial farming environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes a lightweight and attention-enhanced piglet detection and counting network based on an improved YOLOv8n architecture. The design includes three key innovations: (i) the standard C2f modules in the backbone were replaced with an efficient novel Multi-Scale Spatial Pyramid Attention (MSPA) module to enhance the multi-scale feature representation while a maintaining low computational cost; (ii) an improved Gather-and-Distribute (GD) mechanism was incorporated into the neck to facilitate feature fusion and accelerate inference; and (iii) the detection head and the sample assignment strategy were optimized to align the classification and localization tasks better, thereby improving the overall performance. Experiments on the custom dataset demonstrated the model's superiority over state-of-the-art counterparts, achieving 88.5% precision and a 93.8% mAP0.5. Furthermore, ablation studies showed that the model reduced the parameters, floating point operations (FLOPs), and model size by 58.45%, 46.91% and 56.45% compared to those of the baseline YOLOv8n, respectively, while achieving a 2.6% improvement in the detection precision and a 4.41% reduction in the counting MAE. The trained model was deployed on a Raspberry Pi 4B with ncnn to verify the effectiveness of the lightweight design, reaching an average inference speed of <87 ms per image. These findings confirm that the proposed method offers a practical, scalable solution for intelligent pig farming, combining a high accuracy, efficiency, and real-time performance in resource-limited environments.