Dairy cow lameness detection using a back curvature feature

Manual detection of lameness poses several problems, such as difficulty in finding sudden, severe or early lameness behavior. A dairy cow’s lameness is closely related to curvature of the cow’s back. Focusing on the curvature features of dairy cows’ backs, this study proposes a lameness detection method that combines machine vision technology with a deep learning algorithm. Firstly, the FLYOLOv3 algorithm was used to construct a Cow’s Back Position Extraction (CBPE) model to realize the extraction of the dairy cow’s back position coordinates. Simultaneously, a First to Last Frame Image Difference (FLFID) algorithm was used to construct a Cow’s Object Region Extraction (CORE) model to separate the dairy cow from the image background and obtain the pixel region of the dairy cow. Then, a Cow’s Back Curvature Extraction (CBCE) model was used to extract the dairy cow’s back curvature data from the acquired dairy cow’s back position and pixel region of the dairy cow. Finally, a Noise+ Bilateral Long Short-term Memory (BiLSTM) model was used to predict the curvature data and match the curvature features of the dairy cow’s lameness, so as to classify and detect dairy cow lameness. To verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, 567 videos were used to train the network model in a Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) model, a BiLSTM model, Noise+LSTM model, and the model proposed in this paper, respectively, and 243 videos were used for verification and testing. According to the fitting curvature data of the dairy cows’ back obtained by the algorithm used in this paper, it was found that the average classification accuracy of the model proposed in this research was 8.04%, 2.09%, and 5.78% higher than the average classification accuracy of the LSTM, BiLSTM, Noise+LSTM models, respectively. In the parallel experiment that classified the detection of dairy cow lameness, the average classification accuracy of the model proposed in this paper was 96.61%. The above results show that the lameness of dairy cows can be correctly detected through analysis of the curvature features of dairy cows' backs. The proposed method is a novel, deep learning-based method for dairy cow lameness early detection which may have significant economic impact on the dairy industry, and the proposed method provides an innovative means for detecting dairy cow lameness.