UAV-Based Computer Vision for Cattle Detection and Feed Bunk Spatial Analysis

Pedro Oliveira Torrente, Diego Giaretta de Paulo, Lucas Pascotti Valem, Jianglong Yan, Everton Castelão Tetila +2

Beef cattle production is central to Brazilian agribusiness and faces growing demands for efficiency, sustainability, and animal welfare. Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) offers tools to address these challenges, particularly through monitoring feeding-related spatial patterns in confined systems. Feeding management plays a decisive role in animal performance, yet its evaluation still relies largely on subjective, labor-intensive visual inspections that are hard to scale and prone to bias. This work proposes a computer vision framework based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to quantify cattle alignment and spatial dispersion at the feed bunk under real-world feedlot conditions. A UAV dataset was collected during flight campaigns at a commercial feedlot in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Images were manually annotated into cattle head and cattle back classes to support object detection and image-level spatial analysis of cattle distribution. You Only Look Once (YOLO) models, namely YOLOv8 and YOLOv11, were evaluated, with YOLOv8 small used for the downstream spatial analysis. The feed bunk region was segmented using the Segment Anything Model (SAM), and geometric metrics based on…