Abstract: A method for counting suckling piglets based on self-attention spatiotemporal feature fusion is disclosed, which includes: detecting a side-lying sow in a video frame by using CenterNet to acquire a key frame of suckling piglets and a region of interest of the video frame, and overcome the interference of the movement of non-suckling piglets on the spatiotemporal feature extraction for the region of interest; transforming spatiotemporal features extracted by a spatiotemporal two-stream convolutional network from a key frame video clip into a spatiotemporal feature vector, inputting the obtained spatiotemporal feature vector into a temporal, a spatial and a fusion transformer to obtain a self-attention matrix; performing element-wise product for the self-attention matrix and the fused spatiotemporal features to obtain a self-attention spatiotemporal feature map; and inputting the self-attention spatiotemporal feature map into a regression branch of the number of suckling piglets to complete the counting of the