EDC-YOLO-World-DB: A Model for Dairy Cow ROI Detection and Temperature Extraction Under Complex Conditions

Body temperature serves as a crucial indicator of dairy cow health. Traditional rectal temperature (RT) measurement often induces stress responses in animals. Body temperature detection based on infrared thermography (IRT) offers non-invasive and timely advantages, contributing to welfare-oriented farming practices. However, automated detection and temperature extraction from critical cow regions are susceptible to complex illumination, black-and-white fur texture interference, and region of interest (ROI) deformation, resulting in low detection accuracy and poor robustness. To address this, this paper proposes the EDC-YOLO-World-DB framework to enhance detection and temperature extraction performance under complex illumination conditions. First, URetinex-Net and CLAHE methods are employed to enhance low light and overexposed images, respectively, improving structural information and boundary contour clarity. Subsequently, spatial relationship constraints between LU and AA are established using five-class text priors-lower udder (LU), around the anus (AA), rear udder, hind legs, and hind quarters-to strengthen the spatial localisation capability of the model for ROIs. Subsequently, a Dual Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network architecture incorporating EfficientDynamicConv was introduced at the neck of the model to achieve dynamic weight allocation across modalities, levels, and scales. Task Alignment Metric, Gaussian soft-constrained centroid sampling, and combined <i>IoU</i> (<i>C_IoU</i> + <i>G_IoU</i>) loss were introduced to enhance sample matching quality and regression stability. Results demonstrate detection confidence improvements by 0.08 and 0.02 in low light and overexposed conditions, respectively; compared to two-text input, five-text input increases <i>P</i>, <i>R</i>, and <i>mAP50</i> by 3.61%, 3.81%, and 1.67%, respectively; Comprehensive improvements yielded <i>P</i> = 88.65%, <i>R</i> = 85.77%, and <i>mAP50</i> = 89.33%-further surpassing the baseline by 2.79%, 3.01%, and 1.92%, respectively. Temperature extraction experiments demonstrated significantly reduced errors for TMax, TMin, and Tavg. Specifically, for the mean error of LU, TMax, TMin, and Tavg were reduced by 66.6%, 33.5%, and 4.27%, respectively; for AA, TMax, TMin, and Tavg were reduced by 66.6%, 25.4%, and 11.3%, respectively. This study achieves robust detection of LU and AA alongside precise temperature extraction under complex lighting and deformation conditions, providing a viable solution for non-contact, low-interference dairy cow health monitoring.