Sheep identity recognition, age and weight estimation datasets

Abstract: Increased interest of scientists, producers and consumers in sheep identification has been stimulated by the dramatic increase in population and the urge to increase productivity. The world population is expected to exceed 9.6 million in 2050. For this reason, awareness is raised towards the necessity of effective livestock production. Sheep is considered as one of the main of food resources. Most of the research now is directed towards developing real time applications that facilitate sheep identification for breed management and gathering related information like weight and age. Weight and age are key matrices in assessing the effectiveness of production. For this reason, visual analysis proved recently its significant success over other approaches. Visual analysis techniques need enough images for testing and study completion. For this reason, collecting sheep images database is a vital step to fulfill such objective. We provide here datasets for testing and comparing such algorithms which are under development. Our collected dataset consists of 416 color images for different features of sheep in different postures. Images were collected fifty two sheep at a range of year from three months to six years. For each sheep, two images were captured for both sides of the body, two images for both sides of the face, one image from the top view, one image for the hip and one image for the teeth. The collected images cover different illumination, quality levels and angle of rotation. The allocated data set can be used to test sheep identification, weigh estimation, and age detection algorithms. Such algorithms are crucial for disease management, animal assessment and ownership.