An Intelligent Method for Detecting Lameness in Modern Dairy Industry

Lameness is one of the major welfare concerns in the modern dairy industry. In addition, lameness makes severe health and economic problems causing losses in milk production. Although there has a sizable amount of methods, it remains some worthwhile open problems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an intelligent method for detecting the lameness of dairy cow by establishing a visual monitoring system on the laneways after milking process. We employ a technique of Mask-RCNN for cow region extraction and utilize features based on head bob patterns. Our real-life experimental results show that the proposed method has detection accuracy of 95.5% on cow’s region extraction and can classify 80% of the lameness levels correctly.