Individual identification of dairy cows based on convolutional neural networks

• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-019-7344-7
• Publication Date: 2019-02-13T18:49:20Z
• Authors: Weizheng Shen; Hengqi Hu; Baisheng Dai; Xiaoli Wei; Jian Sun; Li Jiang; Yukun Sun
• Keywords: Identification; Cow milk

Individual identification of each cow is significant for precision livestock farming. In this paper, we propose a novel contactless cow identification method based on convolutional neural networks. We first collected a set of side-view images of dairy cows, then employed the YOLO model to detect the cow object in the side-view image, and finally fine-tuned a convolutional neural network model to classify each individual cow. In our experiments, a total of 105 side-view images of cows were collected, and the proposed method achieved an accuracy of 96.65% in cow identification, which outperformed existing experiments. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for cow identification and the potential for our method to be applied to other livestock.