Visual Identification of Individual Holstein Friesian Cattle via Deep Metric Learning
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Holstein Friesian cattle exhibit individually-characteristic black and white coat patterns visually akin to those arising from Turing's reaction-diffusion systems. This work takes advantage of these natural markings in order to automate visual detection and biometric identification of individual Holstein Friesians via convolutional neural networks and deep metric learning techniques. Using agriculturally relevant top-down imaging, we present methods for the detection, localisation, and identification of individual Holstein Friesians in an open herd setting, i.e. where changes in the herd do not require system re-training. We propose the use of SoftMax-based reciprocal triplet loss to address the identification problem and evaluate the techniques in detail against fixed herd paradigms. We find that deep metric learning systems show strong performance even under conditions where cattle unseen during system training are to be identified and re-identified - achieving 98.2 accuracy when trained on just half of the population. This work paves the way for facilitating the visual non-intrusive monitoring of cattle applicable to precision farming for automated health and welfare monitoring and to veterinary research in behavioural analysis, disease outbreak tracing, and more.
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