Comparative Analysis of Real-Time Detection Models for Intelligent Monitoring of Cattle Condition and Behavior

This study benchmarks nine state-of-the-art object detection models on a specialized cattle dataset to assess accuracy and inference speed for real-time agricultural applications. Using a unified protocol without model-specific augmentations, and evaluating all detectors on identical RTX 4090 hardware, we provide a fair architectural comparison of two-stage, one-stage, and transformer-based models. D_FINE_L and Co_DETR_R_50 achieved the highest accuracy (AP@[0.50:0.95] = 0.872 and 0.851), while RTMDet and YOLOv11_L were the fastest (15.81 and 19.14 ms/image). All models showed substantial accuracy gains on the domain dataset compared to COCO, while maintaining consistent relative speed rankings.