Sheep counting: Datasets & Models
A computer vision workflow that detects and counts sheep in images or video from farm cameras and drones. Useful for tracking flock size across pastures, pens, and gates.
Sheep counting
This workflow performs sheep detection using object detection to locate and count each animal in a frame, whether they are grazing in pasture, passing through a race, or held in a pen. It accepts common inputs such as drone imagery, fixed pasture cameras, and handheld video, then returns bounding boxes and a total count for the sheep detected.
Try it out
Powered by general detection model
Run on custom image
Drop an image here or click to upload
Why automate sheep counting
Manually counting sheep across large paddocks is slow, error-prone, and often requires mustering animals into a confined space just to get an accurate tally. For agriculture operations managing hundreds or thousands of head, a missed count can mean unnoticed losses, straying, or predation going undetected for days. Automating sheep detection lets you verify flock numbers from routine drone flights or gate cameras without extra labor, and flag discrepancies the moment they appear. The result is faster, repeatable counts that free up staff for higher-value work.
Key benefits
Automated sheep counting delivers consistent tallies without penning or hand-counting animals, and integrates with the drones and fixed cameras many farms already operate. Detection models scale from a single paddock to an entire station, and can run at the edge or in the cloud depending on connectivity. Because the workflow produces per-frame counts and bounding boxes, it is straightforward to audit results and retrain on your own imagery to improve accuracy in local conditions.
How to use it
- Upload an image: Drop any photo into the widget above to try sheep counting for free, right on this page.
- Preview instant results: The model detects sheep, lamb, ram, sheepdog within seconds and returns an annotated image with structured predictions, so you can immediately see how well it works. Adjust the detection classes and re-run until the results fit your scenario.
- Like what you see?: With a free Roboflow account, you can deploy this workflow with the Serverless Cloud API, customize it in your workspace, or train RF-DETR on your own images for production accuracy.
- Get started for free: No code or training data required to begin: upload, review the results, and make it part of your stack in a single click.
Recommended model for sheep counting
RF-DETR is state of the art for real-time object detection, instance segmentation, and keypoint detection, with higher accuracy and lower latency than comparable models, and it's Apache 2.0 licensed. When you're ready to build a production model for sheep counting, fine-tune it on your own labeled images, then deploy to a Serverless Cloud API endpoint.
Not sure where to start?
Describe your Sheep Counting project to Roboflow Agent.