Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the Wild

Visual identification of cattle in the wild provides an essential way for real-time cattle monitoring applicable to precision livestock farming. Chinese Simmental exhibit a yellow or brown coat with individually characteristic white stripes or spots, which makes a biometric identifier for identifica...

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Main Authors: Jianmin Zhao, Qiusheng Lian, Neal N. Xiong
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022-02-01
Series:Animals
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/12/4/459
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author Jianmin Zhao
Qiusheng Lian
Neal N. Xiong
author_facet Jianmin Zhao
Qiusheng Lian
Neal N. Xiong
author_sort Jianmin Zhao
collection DOAJ
description Visual identification of cattle in the wild provides an essential way for real-time cattle monitoring applicable to precision livestock farming. Chinese Simmental exhibit a yellow or brown coat with individually characteristic white stripes or spots, which makes a biometric identifier for identification possible. This work employed the observable biometric characteristics to perform cattle identification with an image from any viewpoint. We propose multi-center agent loss to jointly supervise the learning of DCNNs by SoftMax with multiple centers and the agent triplet. We reformulated SoftMax with multiple centers to reduce intra-class variance by offering more centers for feature clustering. Then, we utilized the agent triplet, which consisted of the features and the agents, to enforce separation among different classes. As there are no datasets for the identification of cattle with multi-view images, we created CNSID100, consisting of 11,635 images from 100 Chinese Simmental identities. Our proposed loss was comprehensively compared with several well-known losses on CNSID100 and OpenCows2020 and analyzed in an engineering application in the farming environment. It was encouraging to find that our approach outperformed the state-of-the-art models on the datasets above. The engineering application demonstrated that our pipeline with detection and recognition is promising for continuous cattle identification in real livestock farming scenarios.
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spelling doaj.art-3f70697c7f69413f9902acfb465092ef2023-11-23T18:25:26ZengMDPI AGAnimals2076-26152022-02-0112445910.3390/ani12040459Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the WildJianmin Zhao0Qiusheng Lian1Neal N. Xiong2Institute of Information Science and Technology, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao 066004, ChinaInstitute of Information Science and Technology, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao 066004, ChinaDepartment of C.S., Colorado Technical University, Colorado Springs, CO 80907, USAVisual identification of cattle in the wild provides an essential way for real-time cattle monitoring applicable to precision livestock farming. Chinese Simmental exhibit a yellow or brown coat with individually characteristic white stripes or spots, which makes a biometric identifier for identification possible. This work employed the observable biometric characteristics to perform cattle identification with an image from any viewpoint. We propose multi-center agent loss to jointly supervise the learning of DCNNs by SoftMax with multiple centers and the agent triplet. We reformulated SoftMax with multiple centers to reduce intra-class variance by offering more centers for feature clustering. Then, we utilized the agent triplet, which consisted of the features and the agents, to enforce separation among different classes. As there are no datasets for the identification of cattle with multi-view images, we created CNSID100, consisting of 11,635 images from 100 Chinese Simmental identities. Our proposed loss was comprehensively compared with several well-known losses on CNSID100 and OpenCows2020 and analyzed in an engineering application in the farming environment. It was encouraging to find that our approach outperformed the state-of-the-art models on the datasets above. The engineering application demonstrated that our pipeline with detection and recognition is promising for continuous cattle identification in real livestock farming scenarios.https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/12/4/459cattle identificationdeep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs)deep metric learning (DML)open-set recognitionprecision livestock farming
spellingShingle Jianmin Zhao
Qiusheng Lian
Neal N. Xiong
Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the Wild
Animals
cattle identification
deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs)
deep metric learning (DML)
open-set recognition
precision livestock farming
title Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the Wild
title_full Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the Wild
title_fullStr Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the Wild
title_full_unstemmed Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the Wild
title_short Multi-Center Agent Loss for Visual Identification of Chinese Simmental in the Wild
title_sort multi center agent loss for visual identification of chinese simmental in the wild
topic cattle identification
deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs)
deep metric learning (DML)
open-set recognition
precision livestock farming
url https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/12/4/459
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AT qiushenglian multicenteragentlossforvisualidentificationofchinesesimmentalinthewild
AT nealnxiong multicenteragentlossforvisualidentificationofchinesesimmentalinthewild