Developing Intelligent Models to Detect and Classify Cattle Behavior on Pasture

Cattle producers must balance animal welfare with productivity, but regular observation of animals in extensively managed operations is often impractical. Artificial intelligence (AI) integrated with computer vision offers an automated alternative, but few studies compare object detection architectures within the same dataset or focus on pastured cattle. Groups (n = 2–7) of heterogeneous beef cattle were recorded on pasture with nine solar trail cameras. Footage (~132 h) was curated in VideoLAN; annotated in Computer Vision Annotation Tool (CVAT) with bounding boxes and behavioral classes; and split 62/21/17% into training (24,508 frames), validation (8231 frames), and testing (6625 frames) sets. Four architectures were trained: Faster R-CNN (ResNet-50 FPN), Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD300, VGG-16), RetinaNet (ResNet-50 FPN with focal loss), and YOLOv8 nano (Ultralytics). With validation at 0.50 confidence and 0.50 IoU, Faster R-CNN achieved the highest overall F1 (0.79) and best per-class balance; RetinaNet was intermediate (peak F1 = 0.72); SSD300 saturated at F1 = 0.40; and YOLOv8 nano achieved some minority class recall at lower confidence. Each model detected the classes “grazing” and “hay feeding” accurately but confused cattle with the visually similar “normal” class. Datasets, checkpoints, and analysis scripts are provided to support further refinement of AI-enabled monitoring of extensive cattle systems.