Cumulative unsupervised multi-domain adaptation for Holstein cattle re-identification

In dairy farming, ensuring the health of each cow and minimizing economic losses requires individual monitoring, achieved through cow Re-Identification (Re-ID). Computer vision-based Re-ID relies on visually distinguishing features, such as the distinctive coat patterns of breeds like Holstein.

However, annotating every cow in each farm is cost-prohibitive. Our objective is to develop Re-ID methods applicable to both labeled and unlabeled farms, accommodating new individuals and diverse environments. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) techniques bridge this gap, transferring knowledge from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains, but have only been mainly designed for pedestrian and vehicle Re-ID applications.

Our work introduces Cumulative Unsupervised Multi-Domain Adaptation (CUMDA) to address challenges of limited identity diversity and diverse farm appearances. CUMDA accumulates knowledge from all domains, enhancing specialization in known domains and improving generalization to unseen domains. Our contributions include a CUMDA method adapting to multiple unlabeled target domains while preserving source domain performance, along with extensive cross-dataset experiments on three cattle Re-ID datasets. These experiments demonstrate significant enhancements in source preservation, target domain specialization, and generalization to unseen domains.