Use of Biometric Images to Predict Body Weight and Hot Carcass Weight of Nellore Cattle

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Body and carcass weight are important economic characteristics for beef cattle production systems because the value of market cattle is based on weight. The possibility of predicting body and carcass weight through biometric measurements obtained from three-dimensional digital images favor the development of the production system. Predictive approaches, such as artificial neutral network, showed better predictive quality for body weight, while the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and partial least square models were the most suitable for predicting carcass weight. ABSTRACT: The objective of this study was to evaluate different methods of predicting body weight (BW) and hot carcass weight (HCW) from biometric measurements obtained through three-dimensional images of Nellore cattle. We collected BW and HCW of 1350 male Nellore cattle (bulls and steers) from four different experiments. Three-dimensional images of each animal were obtained using the Kinect(®) model 1473 sensor (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA). Models were compared based on root mean square error estimation and concordance correlation coefficient. The predictive quality of the approaches used multiple linear regression (MLR); least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO); partial least square (PLS), and artificial neutral network (ANN) and was affected not only by the conditions (set) but also by the objective (BW vs. HCW). The most stable for BW was the ANN (Set 1: RMSEP = 19.68; CCC = 0.73; Set 2: RMSEP = 27.22; CCC = 0.66; Set 3: RMSEP = 27.23; CCC = 0.70; Set 4: RMSEP = 33.74; CCC = 0.74), which showed predictive quality regardless of the set analyzed. However, when evaluating predictive quality for HCW, the models obtained by LASSO and PLS showed greater quality over the different sets. Overall, the use of three-dimensional images was able to predict BW and HCW in Nellore cattle.