Improving Known–Unknown Cattle’s Face Recognition for Smart Livestock Farm Management

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Over the years, the identification of individual cattle has assumed a pivotal role in health monitoring, reproduction management, behavioral research, and performance tracking. In this study, we propose a method based on artificial intelligence for identifying known and new (unknown) individual Hanwoo cattle, a native breed of Korea, by utilizing cattle’s face images. To accomplish this, we strategically positioned a network of CCTV cameras within a closed farm, demonstrating the efficacy of non-intrusive sensors in capturing real-world data. Furthermore, we devised open-set techniques to tackle challenges such as varying illumination, overlapping objects, and fluctuations in cattle’s face orientations. Our research method not only demonstrated excellent recognition performance in complex real-world cattle’s datasets, but can also be applied to open-set scenarios, wherein unmarked or new cattle may join the herd. Our proposed method can be readily adapted to identifying various livestock species, offering real-time individual recognition, which yields valuable insights for farm management. This deep learning approach amplifies the efficiency of farm operations, thus playing a pivotal role in advancing the agriculture industry as a whole. ABSTRACT: Accurate identification of individual cattle is of paramount importance in precision livestock farming, enabling the monitoring of cattle behavior, disease prevention, and enhanced animal welfare. Unlike human faces, the faces of most Hanwoo cattle, a native breed of Korea, exhibit significant similarities and have the same body color, posing a substantial challenge in accurately distinguishing between individual cattle. In this study, we sought to extend the closed-set scope (only including identifying known individuals) to a more-adaptable open-set recognition scenario (identifying both known and unknown individuals) termed Cattle’s Face Open-Set Recognition (CFOSR). By integrating open-set techniques to enhance the closed-set accuracy, the proposed method simultaneously addresses the open-set scenario. In CFOSR, the objective is to develop a trained model capable of accurately identifying known individuals, while effectively handling unknown or novel individuals, even in cases where the model has been trained solely on known individuals. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that integrates Adversarial Reciprocal Points Learning (ARPL), a state-of-the-art open-set recognition method, with the effectiveness of Additive Margin Softmax loss (AM-Softmax). ARPL was leveraged to mitigate the overlap between spaces of known and unknown or unregistered cattle. At the same time, AM-Softmax was chosen over the conventional Cross-Entropy loss (CE) to classify known individuals. The empirical results obtained from a real-world dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of the ARPL and AM-Softmax techniques in achieving both intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Notably, the results of the open-set recognition and closed-set recognition validated the superior performance of our proposed method compared to existing algorithms. To be more precise, our method achieved an AUROC of 91.84 and an OSCR of 87.85 in the context of open-set recognition on a complex dataset. Simultaneously, it demonstrated an accuracy of 94.46 for closed-set recognition. We believe that our study provides a novel vision to improve the classification accuracy of the closed set. Simultaneously, it holds the potential to significantly contribute to herd monitoring and inventory management, especially in scenarios involving the presence of unknown or novel cattle.