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To improve the detection speed of cow mounting behavior and the lightness of the model in dense scenes, this study proposes a lightweight rapid detection system for cow mounting behavior. Using the concept of EfficientNetV2, a lightweight backbone network is designed using an attention mechanism, inverted residual structure, and depth-wise separable convolution. Next, a feature enhancement module is designed using residual structure, efficient attention mechanism, and Ghost convolution. Finally, YOLOv5s, the lightweight backbone network, and the feature enhancement module are combined to construct a lightweight rapid recognition model for cow mounting behavior. Multiple cameras were installed in a barn with 200 cows to obtain 3343 images that formed the cow mounting behavior dataset. Based on the experimental results, the inference speed of the model put forward in this study is as high as 333.3 fps, the inference time per image is 4.1 ms, and the model mAP value is 87.7%. The mAP value of the proposed model is shown to be 2.1% higher than that of YOLOv5s, the inference speed is 0.47 times greater than that of YOLOv5s, and the model weight is 2.34 times less than that of YOLOv5s. According to the obtained results, the model proposed in the current work shows high accuracy and inference speed and acquires the automatic detection of cow mounting behavior in dense scenes, which would be beneficial for the all-weather real-time monitoring of multi-channel cameras in large cattle farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the detection speed of cow mounting behavior and the lightness of the model in dense scenes, this study proposes a lightweight rapid detection system for cow mounting behavior. Using the concept of EfficientNetV2, a lightweight backbone network is designed using an attention mechanism, inverted residual structure, and depth-wise separable convolution. Next, a feature enhancement module is designed using residual structure, efficient attention mechanism, and Ghost convolution. Finally, YOLOv5s, the lightweight backbone network, and the feature enhancement module are combined to construct a lightweight rapid recognition model for cow mounting behavior. Multiple cameras were installed in a barn with 200 cows to obtain 3343 images that formed the cow mounting behavior dataset. Based on the experimental results, the inference speed of the model put forward in this study is as high as 333.3 fps, the inference time per image is 4.1 ms, and the model mAP value is 87.7%. The mAP value of the proposed model is shown to be 2.1% higher than that of YOLOv5s, the inference speed is 0.47 times greater than that of YOLOv5s, and the model weight is 2.34 times less than that of YOLOv5s. According to the obtained results, the model proposed in the current work shows high accuracy and inference speed and acquires the automatic detection of cow mounting behavior in dense scenes, which would be beneficial for the all-weather real-time monitoring of multi-channel cameras in large cattle farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cow recognition forms the foundation of smart livestock management. Current closed-set cow recognition models can exclusively identify cows within their training set and are ill-equipped to recognize other subjects in the open world. Additionally, there is a dearth of comprehensive research on open-set cow recognition. Existing open-set recognition models not only exhibit suboptimal accuracy but also impose a substantial burden on hardware resources due to their extensive parameterization. These challenges hinder the practical deployment of cow recognition models. This study introduces an innovative open-set metric learning-based recognition framework for cow-back patterns, aiming to rectify a significant limitation of individual cow recognition models, which is their inability to identify cows not included in the training set. The proposed framework combines various loss functions, metric methods, and backbone networks. This integration enables the open-set recognition of cow back pattern images, thereby facilitating the identification of cows previously unrecognized by the model. To mitigate hardware resource consumption, we have devised a novel ultra-lightweight backbone network known as LightCowsNet. This network draws inspiration from existing lightweight backbone networks such as MobileFaceNet, MobileViT, and EfficientNetV2. Its purpose is to extract features from cow back pattern images efficiently. LightCowsNet employs attention mechanisms, inverted residual structures, and depthwise separable convolutions. LightCowsNet first uses attention mechanisms, inverted residual structures, and depthwise separable convolutions to design multiple new feature extraction modules. These modules, which have different structures, are subsequently placed to extract different levels of image information, which enables complete extraction of the textural information of the cows' back patterns. The present study reorganized the Cows2021 dataset to render it suitable for open-set recognition of cow-back patterns, with the test set comprising image pairs. The results revealed that using A-SoftMax as the loss function and Euclidean distance as the metric method enabled LightCowsNet to achieve the highest accuracy of 94.26 %, with a model weight space occupation of only 4.06 MB. Compared to MobileFaceNet, MobileViT, and EfficientNetV2, LightCowsNet achieved 6.24 %, 8.82 %, and 2.3 % greater accuracy on the test set, respectively. Its weight also decreased by 0.71 MB, 0.24 MB, and 4.3 MB, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed model achieved both accuracy improvement and model lightweightness, and these findings could serve as reference solutions for intelligent farming on cow farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the current process of large-scale dairy-cattle breeding, to address the problems of low recognition-accuracy and significant recognition-error associated with existing visual methods, we propose a method for recognizing the feeding behavior of dairy cows, one based on an improved RefineMask instance-segmentation model, and using high-quality detection and segmentation results to realize the recognition of the feeding behavior of dairy cows. Firstly, the input features are better extracted by incorporating the convolutional block attention module into the residual module of the feature extraction network. Secondly, an efficient channel attention module is incorporated into the neck design to achieve efficient integration of feature extraction while avoiding the surge of parameter volume computation. Subsequently, the GIoU loss function is used to increase the area of the prediction frame to optimize the convergence speed of the loss function, thus improving the regression accuracy. Finally, the logic of using mask information to recognize foraging behavior was designed, and the accurate recognition of foraging behavior was achieved according to the segmentation results of the model. We constructed, trained, and tested a cow dataset consisting of 1000 images from 50 different individual cows at peak feeding times. The method's effectiveness, robustness, and accuracy were verified by comparing it with example segmentation algorithms such as MSRCNN, Point_Rend, Cascade_Mask, and ConvNet_V2. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the improved RefineMask algorithm in recognizing the bounding box and accurately determining the segmentation mask is 98.3%, which is higher than that of the benchmark model by 0.7 percentage points; for this, the model parameter count size was 49.96 M, which meets the practical needs of local deployment. In addition, the technologies under study performed well in a variety of scenarios and adapted to various light environments; this research can provide technical support for the analysis of the relationship between cow feeding behavior and feed intake during peak feeding periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydrogen is a key metabolite that connects microbial fermentation and methanogenesis in the rumen. This study was to investigate the effects of elevated H 2 produced by elemental Mg on rumen fermentation and methanogenesis in dairy cows. Four nonlactating Chinese Holstein dairy cows were employed for this experiment in a replicated crossover design. The 2 dietary treatments included a basal diet supplemented with Mg(OH) 2 (14.5 g/kg of feed dry matter) or elemental Mg (6.00 g/kg of feed dry matter). When compared with Mg(OH) 2 treatment, cows fed diet with elemental Mg had similar rumen Mg2+ concentration, but higher rumen dissolved H 2 and methane concentrations at 2.5 h after morning feeding. Also, elemental Mg supplementation decreased feed digestibility, rumen volatile fatty acid concentration, and relative abundance of group Ruminococcaceae_UCG-014 , genus Bifidobacterium , and group Mollicutes_RF9 , increased acetate to propionate ratio, succinate concentration, and abundance of family Christensenellaceae. Elemental Mg supplementation increased enteric CH 4 emission, altered methanogen community with increased abundance of order Methanomassiliicoccales , 16S ribosomal RNA gene copies of methanogens, and order Methanobacteriales. In summary, the pulse of elevated dissolved H 2 after feeding produced by elemental Mg inhibited rumen fermentation and feed digestibility by decreasing the abundance of carbohydrate-degrading bacteria, promoted H 2 incorporation into succinate by increasing family Christensenellaceae and genus Bacteroidales_BS11 , and increased H 2 utilization for methanogenesis by favoring growth of methanogens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]