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Images captured during rainy days present the challenge of maintaining a symmetrical balance between foreground elements (like rain streaks) and the background scenery. The interplay between these rain-obscured images is reminiscent of the principle of symmetry, where one element, the rain streak, overshadows or disrupts the visual quality of the entire image. The challenge lies not just in eradicating the rain streaks but in ensuring the background is symmetrically restored to its original clarity. Recently, numerous deraining algorithms that employ deep learning techniques have been proposed, demonstrating promising results. Yet, achieving a perfect symmetrical balance by effectively removing rain streaks from a diverse set of images, while also symmetrically restoring the background details, is a monumental task. To address this issue, we introduce an image-deraining algorithm that leverages multi-scale dilated residual recurrent networks. The algorithm begins by utilizing convolutional activation layers to symmetrically process both the foreground and background features. Then, to ensure the symmetrical dissemination of the characteristics of rain streaks and the background, it employs long short-term memory networks in conjunction with gated recurrent units across various stages. The algorithm then incorporates dilated residual blocks (DRB), composed of dilated convolutions with three distinct dilation factors. This integration expands the receptive field, facilitating the extraction of deep, multi-scale features of both the rain streaks and background information. Furthermore, considering the complex and diverse nature of rain streaks, a channel attention (CA) mechanism is incorporated to capture richer image features and enhance the model's performance. Ultimately, convolutional layers are employed to fuse the image features, resulting in a derained image. An evaluation encompassing seven benchmark datasets, assessed using five quality metrics against various conventional and modern algorithms, confirms the robustness and flexibility of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precision dairy farming technology is widely used to improve the management efficiency and reduce cost in large-scale dairy farms. Machine vision systems are non-contact technologies to obtain individual and behavioral information from animals. However, the accuracy of image-based individual identification of dairy cows is still inadequate, which limits the application of machine vision technologies in large-scale dairy farms. There are three key problems in dairy cattle identification based on images and biometrics: (1) the biometrics of different dairy cattle may be similar; (2) the complex shooting environment leads to the instability of image quality; and (3) for the end-to-end identification method, the identity of each cow corresponds to a pattern, and the increase in the number of cows will lead to a rapid increase in the number of outputs and parameters of the identification model. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a cascaded dairy individual cow identification method based on DeepOtsu and EfficientNet, which can realize a breakthrough in dairy cow group identification accuracy and speed by binarization and cascaded classification of dairy cow body pattern images. The specific implementation steps of the proposed method are as follows. First, the YOLOX model was used to locate the trunk of the cow in the side-looking walking image to obtain the body pattern image, and then, the DeepOtsu model was used to binarize the body pattern image. After that, primary classification was carried out according to the proportion of black pixels in the binary image; then, for each subcategory obtained by the primary classification, the EfficientNet-B1 model was used for secondary classification to achieve accurate and rapid identification of dairy cows. A total of 11,800 side-looking walking images of 118 cows were used to construct the dataset; and the training set, validation set, and test set were constructed at a ratio of 5:3:2. The test results showed that the binarization segmentation accuracy of the body pattern image is 0.932, and the overall identification accuracy of the individual cow identification method is 0.985. The total processing time of a single image is 0.433 s. The proposed method outperforms the end-to-end dairy individual cow identification method in terms of efficiency and training speed. This study provides a new method for the identification of individual dairy cattle in large-scale dairy farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cow lameness is a complex locomotion behaviour, and effective characteristics are the key to identifying early lameness. Machine learning methods were used to quantify the movement of the hooves and head of cows, and they showed the possibility of using the head- and back-hoof linkage features extracted from motion analysis to classify early lameness. Firstly, the key points of the body in the side-view walking videos were tracked by DeepLabCut (DLC). Based on the curves of hoof movement and head swing, the head-hoof linkage pattern was analysed. Second, the curve of cow's back was extracted and the back-hoof linkage feature was built when the hoof touched the ground. At the same time, the movement curves were analysed to extract five other gait characteristics, including asymmetry of stride length, tracking up, asymmetry in the proportion of supporting phase, landing speed, and moving speed. Multiple models were trained on a dataset containing 212 videos, and 10-fold cross-validation was used to verify the performance of the algorithm. The classification performance was improved by optimising the model and algorithm. Overall accuracy and recall were 89.2% and 90.7%, respectively. The scores of the importance of features calculated by the Chi-square test showed that the head- and back-hoof linkage features play an important role in the classification of early lame cows. The hooves and their linkage features with the head and back of cows proposed in this paper can thus effectively detect early lameness in cows. • DeepLabCut was used to track four hooves and head of walking cow. • Head- and back-hoof linkage features was analysed. • Seven lameness indicators were used to build the model. • The recall of classification for early lame cows was 90.7%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]