Review of researches and technologies applicable to digitalization of the process of assessing the exterior of meat and dairy animals

Abstract

To increase the efficiency of livestock farming, scientists are developing information and communication technologies aimed at digitalizing the process of assessing the exterior of animals. This review should improve understanding of the development steps of systems applicable to the digitalization of animal conformation assessment using computer vision and deep learning neural networks. The search focused on several topics: computer vision systems; training datasets; image acquisition systems; deep learning models; neural networks for training; performance parameters and system evaluation. Machine vision is an innovative solution by combining sensors and neural networks, providing a non-contact way to assess livestock conditions as cameras can replace human observation. Two approaches are used to obtain three-dimensional images for digitalization tasks in animal husbandry: shooting animals using one 3D camera fixed in one place, and shooting from different points using several 3D cameras that record images of animals and individual parts of their bodies, such like an udder. The features extracted from the images, called dorsal features, are used as input to the models. The reviewed publications used a variety of deep learning models, including CNN, DNN, R-CNN, and SSD, depending on the task. Similarly, neural networks such as EfficientNet, ShapeNet, DeepLabCut and RefineDet have been mainly used for animal health monitoring, while GoogleNet, AlexNet, NasNet, CapsNet, LeNet and ERFNet are mainly used for identification purposes.