A Parallel Attention Network for Cattle Face Recognition
This addresses the problem of cattle identification in unconstrained settings for animal husbandry and research, representing a domain-specific incremental advance.
The paper tackles cattle face recognition in wild environments by creating the first large-scale dataset (ICRWE) and proposing a parallel attention network (PANet), achieving 88.03% accuracy and state-of-the-art performance.
Cattle face recognition holds paramount significance in domains such as animal husbandry and behavioral research. Despite significant progress in confined environments, applying these accomplishments in wild settings remains challenging. Thus, we create the first large-scale cattle face recognition dataset, ICRWE, for wild environments. It encompasses 483 cattle and 9,816 high-resolution image samples. Each sample undergoes annotation for face features, light conditions, and face orientation. Furthermore, we introduce a novel parallel attention network, PANet. Comprising several cascaded Transformer modules, each module incorporates two parallel Position Attention Modules (PAM) and Feature Mapping Modules (FMM). PAM focuses on local and global features at each image position through parallel channel attention, and FMM captures intricate feature patterns through non-linear mappings. Experimental results indicate that PANet achieves a recognition accuracy of 88.03% on the ICRWE dataset, establishing itself as the current state-of-the-art approach. The source code is available in the supplementary materials.