AI-Based Teat Shape and Skin Condition Prediction for Dairy Management
This work addresses the need for cost reduction and improved animal health management in the dairy industry, though it is incremental as it leverages existing ML vision models.
The paper tackled the problem of automating dairy cow teat health monitoring by adapting AI tools for teat localization, shape, and skin condition classification, achieving a mean Average Precision of 0.783 for shape prediction and 0.828 for skin condition prediction.
Dairy owners spend significant effort to keep their animals healthy. There is good reason to hope that technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) could reduce these costs, yet obstacles arise when adapting advanced tools to farming environments. In this work, we adapt AI tools to dairy cow teat localization, teat shape, and teat skin condition classifications. We also curate a data collection and analysis methodology for a Machine Learning (ML) pipeline. The resulting teat shape prediction model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.783, and the teat skin condition model achieves a mean average precision of 0.828. Our work leverages existing ML vision models to facilitate the individualized identification of teat health and skin conditions, applying AI to the dairy management industry.