Automatic Retrieval of Specific Cows from Unlabeled Videos
This addresses the need for hands-free cataloging and identification of cows in dairy herds, which is an incremental improvement in domain-specific automation.
The paper tackles the problem of automated identification of individual cows in unlabeled videos, achieving a system that can find specific cows in continuous, unsegmented footage from a dairy farm.
Few automated video systems are described in the open literature that enable hands-free cataloging and identification (ID) of cows in a dairy herd. In this work, we describe our system, composed of an AutoCattloger, which builds a Cattlog of dairy cows in a herd with a single input video clip per cow, an eidetic cow recognizer which uses no deep learning to ID cows, and a CowFinder, which IDs cows in a continuous stream of video. We demonstrate its value in finding individuals in unlabeled, unsegmented videos of cows walking unconstrained through the holding area of a milking parlor.