Automatic body condition scoring system for dairy cows in group state based on improved YOLOv5 and video analysis

This study proposes an automated scoring system for cow body condition using improved YOLOv5 to assess the body condition distribution of herd cows, which significantly impacts herd productivity and feeding management. A dataset was created by capturing images of the cow's hindquarters using an image sensor at the entrance of the milking hall. This system enhances feature extraction ability by introducing dual path networks and convolutional block attention modules and improves efficiency by replacing some modules from the standard YOLOv5s with deep separable convolution to reduce parameters. Furthermore, the system employs an automatic detection and segmentation algorithm to achieve individual cow segmentation and body condition acquisition in the video. Subsequently, the system computes the body condition distribution of cows in a group state. The experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the original YOLOv5 network with higher accuracy and fewer computations and parameters. The precision, recall, and mean average precision of the model are 94.3 %, 92.5 %, and 91.8 %, respectively. The algorithm achieved an overall detection rate of 94.2 % for individual cow segmentation and body condition acquisition in the video, with a body condition scoring accuracy of 92.5 % among accurately detected cows and an overall body condition scoring accuracy of 87.1 % across the 10 video tests. • Automatic scoring of cow body condition can improve herd management efficiency. • A spatiotemporal prior-based algorithm is developed for cow segmentation and scoring. • The system is validated for application in real-world video streams.