Unique temperature change patterns in calves eyes and muzzles: a non-invasive approach using infrared thermography and object detection.

This study investigates the potential of non-invasive, continuous temperature measurement techniques for assessing cattle welfare. We employed advanced object detection algorithms and infrared thermography to accurately extract and continuously measure temperatures of the eyes and muzzles of 11 calves over several months (total, 33 samples). A mobile thermal imaging camera was paired with the Mask R-CNN algorithm (object detection) trained on annotated datasets to detect eye and muzzle regions accurately. Temperature data were processed by outlier rejection, standardization, and low-pass filtering to derive temperature change patterns. Cosine similarity metrics and permutation tests were employed to evaluate the uniqueness of these patterns among the individuals. The average cosine similarity between eye and muzzle temperature changes in the same individual across 33 samples was 0.72, with permutation tests yielding p-values <0.01 for most samples, indicating pattern uniqueness. This study highlights the potential of high-frequency, non-invasive temperature measurements for detecting subtle physiological changes in animals without causing distress.