A Novel Lightweight Dairy Cattle Body Condition Scoring Model for Edge Devices Based on Tail Features and Attention Mechanisms

The Body Condition Score (BCS) is a key indicator of dairy cattle's health, production efficiency, and environmental impact. Manual BCS assessment is subjective and time-consuming, limiting its scalability in precision agriculture. This study utilizes computer vision to automatically assess cattle body condition by analyzing tail features, categorizing BCS into five levels (3.25, 3.50, 3.75, 4.0, 4.25). SE attention improves feature selection by adjusting channel importance, while spatial attention enhances spatial information processing by focusing on key image regions. EfficientNet-B0, enhanced by SE and spatial attention mechanisms, improves feature extraction and localization. To facilitate edge device deployment, model distillation reduces the size from 23.8 MB to 8.7 MB, improving inference speed and storage efficiency. After distillation, the model achieved 91.10% accuracy, 91.14% precision, 91.10% recall, and 91.10% F1 score. The accuracy increased to 97.57% for ±0.25 BCS error and 99.72% for ±0.5 error. This model saves space and meets real-time monitoring requirements, making it suitable for edge devices with limited resources. This research provides an efficient, scalable method for automated livestock health monitoring, supporting intelligent animal husbandry development.