Identification of Individual Hanwoo Cattle by Muzzle Pattern Images through Deep Learning

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Cattle identification is necessary for precision feeding and management. Cattle muzzles have unique patterns, which can be used as a biometric identification key. This study aimed to identify cattle via a deep learning model based on muzzle images. Muzzle patterns were cropped from images using the YOLO v8-based image cropping model. Various artificial intelligence models based on neural networks were studied through transfer learning cropped images for cattle recognition with four optimizers. Several models showed a high prediction accuracy of over 97 percent, implicating the possibility for real farm usage. ABSTRACT: The objective of this study was to identify Hanwoo cattle via a deep-learning model using muzzle images. A total of 9230 images from 336 Hanwoo were used. Images of the same individuals were taken at four different times to avoid overfitted models. Muzzle images were cropped by the YOLO v8-based model trained with 150 images with manual annotation. Data blocks were composed of image and national livestock traceability numbers and were randomly selected and stored as train, validation test data. Transfer learning was performed with the tiny, small and medium versions of Efficientnet v2 models with SGD, RMSProp, Adam and Lion optimizers. The small version using Lion showed the best validation accuracy of 0.981 in 36 epochs within 12 transfer-learned models. The top five models achieved the best validation accuracy and were evaluated with the training data for practical usage. The small version using Adam showed the best test accuracy of 0.970, but the small version using RMSProp showed the lowest repeated error. Results with high accuracy prediction in this study demonstrated the potential of muzzle patterns as an identification key for individual cattle.