A Cascaded Individual Cow Identification Method Based on DeepOtsu and EfficientNet

Precision dairy farming technology is widely used to improve the management efficiency and reduce cost in large-scale dairy farms. Machine vision systems are non-contact technologies to obtain individual and behavioral information from animals. However, the accuracy of image-based individual identification of dairy cows is still inadequate, which limits the application of machine vision technologies in large-scale dairy farms. There are three key problems in dairy cattle identification based on images and biometrics: (1) the biometrics of different dairy cattle may be similar; (2) the complex shooting environment leads to the instability of image quality; and (3) for the end-to-end identification method, the identity of each cow corresponds to a pattern, and the increase in the number of cows will lead to a rapid increase in the number of outputs and parameters of the identification model. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a cascaded dairy individual cow identification method based on DeepOtsu and EfficientNet, which can realize a breakthrough in dairy cow group identification accuracy and speed by binarization and cascaded classification of dairy cow body pattern images. The specific implementation steps of the proposed method are as follows. First, the YOLOX model was used to locate the trunk of the cow in the side-looking walking image to obtain the body pattern image, and then, the DeepOtsu model was used to binarize the body pattern image. After that, primary classification was carried out according to the proportion of black pixels in the binary image; then, for each subcategory obtained by the primary classification, the EfficientNet-B1 model was used for secondary classification to achieve accurate and rapid identification of dairy cows. A total of 11,800 side-looking walking images of 118 cows were used to construct the dataset; and the training set, validation set, and test set were constructed at a ratio of 5:3:2. The test results showed that the binarization segmentation accuracy of the body pattern image is 0.932, and the overall identification accuracy of the individual cow identification method is 0.985. The total processing time of a single image is 0.433 s. The proposed method outperforms the end-to-end dairy individual cow identification method in terms of efficiency and training speed. This study provides a new method for the identification of individual dairy cattle in large-scale dairy farms.