Facial recognition is coming to the cattle industry.
Kansas State University researchers are using technology already in use at airports to recognize human faces and adapting it for cows. The goal is to create a disease traceability system which could also serve as a digital bovine database.
They recently tested the artificial intelligence with 1,000 short videos of cows and it correctly identified 94 percent of them.
According to KC Olson, an animal scientist, “These results were encouraging enough where that company invested in the development of a cell phone application. What this cell phone app will do for any producers that wants to participate - you simply position the cell phone camera in front of the animal, when conditions are right, as judged by the app, it will snap a series of pictures, it will put a GPS stamp on each one and a date stamp on each one. Those are automatically uploaded to a secure cloud database.”
The technology should be commercialized this fall, but next year there could be the ability to add birth dates, weaning weights, and even vaccination history.