Abstract
Individual identification of dairy cows based on computer vision technology shows strong performance and practicality. Accurate identification of each dairy cow is the prerequisite of artificial intelligence technology applied in smart animal husbandry. While the rump of each dairy cow also has lots of important features, so do the back and head, which are also important for individual recognition. In this paper, we propose a non-contact cow rump identification method based on convolutional neural networks. First, the rump image sequences of the cows while feeding were collected. Then, an object detection model was applied to detect the cow rump object in each frame of image. Finally, a fine-tuned convolutional neural network model was trained to identify cow rumps. An image dataset containing 195 different cows was created to validate the proposed method. The method achieved an identification accuracy of 99.76%, which showed a better performance compared to other related methods and a good potential in the actual production environment of cow husbandry, and the model is light enough to be deployed in an edge-computing device.
Highlights
IntroductionIndividual identification is a tool that could be used to manage the possible development and the diseases of the dairy cows [1]
The implementation of automatic individual cow identification is the fundamental ingredient which will extend to fields such as intelligent milking, automatic behavior and health monitoring, etc. [2,3]
In terms of the base network selection of the model, this experiment compared the experimental results of five typical convolutional neural network models
Summary
Individual identification is a tool that could be used to manage the possible development and the diseases of the dairy cows [1]. For modern precision dairy farming, the individual cow has been paid more attention than the herd. The implementation of automatic individual cow identification is the fundamental ingredient which will extend to fields such as intelligent milking, automatic behavior and health monitoring, etc. We proposed a cow identification method focused on the rump part, which can be applied to some fields of intelligent analysis and individualized behavior detection with less labor, such as lameness detection, body condition scoring, individual localization, etc. The cow identification based on other angles of view and various systems for cows can take it as a reference
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