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Article

Research on Sika Deer Behavior Recognition Based on YOLOv11 Lightweight SDB-YOLO Model for Small Sample Learning

1
College of Information Technology, Jilin Agricultural University, Changchun 130118, China
2
Jilin Province Agricultural Internet of Things Technology Collaborative Innovation Center, Changchun 130118, China
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Animals 2026, 16(1), 108; https://doi.org/10.3390/ani16010108 (registering DOI)
Submission received: 8 December 2025 / Revised: 26 December 2025 / Accepted: 29 December 2025 / Published: 30 December 2025
(This article belongs to the Section Animal System and Management)

Simple Summary

In practical breeding scenarios, automatic behavior recognition for sika deer often lacks accuracy due to limited behavioral samples collected, coupled with factors like lighting variations and occlusions. This study proposes a more compact new model, SDB-YOLO, to address this issue. The model effectively utilizes limited data to capture more representative behavioral information from images while reducing computational overhead. Simultaneously, the newly designed recognition architecture enhances training stability and facilitates higher accuracy in small-sample environments. Experimental results demonstrate that SDB-YOLO achieves a 90.2% recognition accuracy while maintaining extremely low computational requirements, outperforming existing baseline models.

Abstract

In the breeding scene, limited by the small number of samples and environmental interference such as illumination occlusion, sika deer behavior recognition still faces challenges such as insufficient feature representation and weak cross-scale modeling ability. To this end, this study builds a lightweight improved model SDB-YOLO based on YOLOv11n. Firstly, the FPSC module is proposed to enhance the correlation between multi-scale features through the shared convolution mechanism, so as to significantly improve the quality of feature fusion under the condition of small samples. Secondly, the Ghost feature generation and dynamic convolution strategy are introduced into the C3k2 module to construct the C3_GDConv structure, so as to strengthen the fine-grained behavior pattern modeling ability and reduce redundant calculations. In addition, the CBAM attention mechanism is added to the neck of the network to further improve the ability of key information extraction and enhance the discrimination of feature expression. Finally, the EfficientHead was used to replace the original detection head to obtain a more robust training process and higher detection accuracy in small-sample scenarios. Experimental results show that SDB-YOLO achieves 90.2% detection accuracy with only 4.3 GFLOPs of calculation, which achieves significant performance improvement compared with YOLOv11n, and verifies the effectiveness and lightweight advantages of the proposed method in small-sample special animal behavior recognition tasks.
Keywords: sika deer behavior; pose recognition; YOLOv11; lightweight model sika deer behavior; pose recognition; YOLOv11; lightweight model

Share and Cite

MDPI and ACS Style

Gong, H.; Wang, Z.; Hu, J.; Li, Y.; Liu, L.; Yu, Y.; Fan, J.; Mu, Y. Research on Sika Deer Behavior Recognition Based on YOLOv11 Lightweight SDB-YOLO Model for Small Sample Learning. Animals 2026, 16, 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani16010108

AMA Style

Gong H, Wang Z, Hu J, Li Y, Liu L, Yu Y, Fan J, Mu Y. Research on Sika Deer Behavior Recognition Based on YOLOv11 Lightweight SDB-YOLO Model for Small Sample Learning. Animals. 2026; 16(1):108. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani16010108

Chicago/Turabian Style

Gong, He, Zuoqi Wang, Jinghuan Hu, Yan Li, Longyan Liu, Yanhong Yu, Juanjuan Fan, and Ye Mu. 2026. "Research on Sika Deer Behavior Recognition Based on YOLOv11 Lightweight SDB-YOLO Model for Small Sample Learning" Animals 16, no. 1: 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani16010108

APA Style

Gong, H., Wang, Z., Hu, J., Li, Y., Liu, L., Yu, Y., Fan, J., & Mu, Y. (2026). Research on Sika Deer Behavior Recognition Based on YOLOv11 Lightweight SDB-YOLO Model for Small Sample Learning. Animals, 16(1), 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani16010108

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