Algorithm for cattle identification based on locating key area

Abstract

Non-contact identification of cattle is the basis for cattle management, insurance claims, and traceability of milk sources and meat products. In order to lower the threshold of deep learning technology in practical application and improve the recognition accuracy, this paper uses the localization and classification paradigm, fills the image and proposes the LKA (Locate Key Area) module, which further improves the identification accuracy of cattle without using any labeling information. To avoid the impact of different collection devices, we use three brands of mobile phones and two cameras to collect data. Due to the fact that CNN features do not have scale invariance, the image is filled as a square, and the filling value is discussed. Finally, (0,0,0) is selected for filling. In order to reduce the labeling of new data, the face, torso, and body of the cattle are first detected, and then automatically trimmed to build a classification dataset. In order to further improve the accuracy of classification, LKA module is proposed. This module locates key areas based on the results of class activation map and uses shallow features for monitoring. Thereby completing fine-grained feature extraction without supervision information. Finally, the features of different parts are adjusted for fusion recognition. Experiments were conducted on the head, torso, and whole of cattle. Based on the ResNet50 network architecture, after filling the image into a square, the recognition accuracy has been improved by 0.30%, 0.21%, and 0.43%, respectively. After further adding LKA modules, the accuracy rates were improved by 0.59%, 0.59%, and 0.45%, respectively. In the fusion experiment, ResNet50_LKA and MobileNetV3_LKA achieves 100% accuracy. Experiments have realized dataset construction and fine-grained feature extraction without labeled information, and achieved high recognition accuracy, proving the effectiveness of our method.