Recognition and statistical method of cows rumination and eating behaviors based on Tensorflow.js

Abstract

Information about dairy cow ruminating is closely associated with the health status of dairy cows. Therefore, it is of great significance to recognize and make statistics of dairy cows’ ruminating and feeding behavior. Concerning conventional recognition methods which are dependent on contact type devices, they have some defects of poor instantaneity and strong stress responses. As for recognition based on machine vision, it needs to transmit masses of data and raises high requirements for the cloud server and network performance. According to principles of edge computing, the model is deployed via Tensorflow.js in an edge device in the present study, constructing a recognition and statistical system for ruminating and feeding behavior of dairy cows. Through the application programming interface (API) of the browser, an edge device is able to invoke a camera and acquire dairy cow images. Then, the images can be inputted in the SSD MobileNet V2 model, which is followed by inference based on browser hashrate. Moreover, the edge device merely uploads recognition results to the cloud server for statistics, which features high instantaneity and compatibility. In terms of recognizing ruminating and feeding behavior of dairy cows, the proposed system has a precision ratio of 96.50%, a recall rate of 91.77%, an F1-score of 94.08%, specificity of 91.36%, and accuracy of 91.66%. This suggests that the proposed method is effective in recognizing dairy cow behavior.