Cow Body Shape and Automation of Condition Scoring

Abstract

The feasibility of including a body shape measure in methods for automatic monitoring of body reserves of cattle was evaluated. The hypothesis tested was that the body shape of a fatter cow is rounder than that of a thin cow and, therefore, may better fit a parabolic shape. An image-processing model was designed that calculates a parameter to assess body shape. The model was implemented, and its outputs were validated against ultrasonic and thermal camera measurements of the thickness of fat and muscle layers, and manual body condition scoring of 186 Holstein-Friesian cows. The thermal camera overcomes some of the drawbacks of a regular camera; the hooks and the tailhead nadirs of a thin cow diverged from the parabolic shape. The correlation between thermal camera's measurements and fat and muscle thickness was 0.47. Mean body condition scorings were 2.18, 2.15, and 2.23, with no significant difference found across the assessment methods. Further research is needed to achieve fully automatic, accurate body condition scoring.

A preliminarily study for predicting body weight and milk properties in lactating Holstein cows using a three-dimensional camera system

“…Ozkaya and Bozkurt (2008) found predictive ability of digital image analysis for estimating BW was poor when the animal has a large frame, as is the case for Holstein cows. To overcome these drawbacks of using a standard camera for assessing body shape, researchers have examined the use of other imaging system such as ultrasound (Domecq et al, 1995;Schröder and Staufenbiel, 2006) and thermal cameras (Halachmi et al, 2008).…”

Advances in Automatic Detection of Body Condition Score of Cows: A Mini Review

“…In more recent studies the use of 3D cameras is more frequent. The use of thermal cameras, 17,21 although allows an easy segmentation of the entire body of the cow (the warm cow shape highlight above its cold surroundings), are less common probably associated to a their higher costs. In Marilyn Krukowski 11 and Dorota Anglart 20 they used red breed dairy cows because the camera used to acquire the images has operational problems with black pigment cows.…”

Computational Intelligence based construction of a Body Condition Assessment system for cattle

“…Halachmi et a. [5] made use of thermal cameras to segment the rear-end shape of the cows. The segmentation was then fitted to a parabola testing the hypothesis that fatter cows are closer to this kind of curve than thinner ones.…”