Although rectal temperature is reliable, its measurement requires manual handling and causes stress to animals. IRT provides a non-contact alternative but often ignores bilateral eye temperature differences. This study presents an E-S-YOLO11n model for the automated detection of the binocular regions of sheep, which achieves remarkable performance with a precision of 98.2%, recall of 98.5%, mAP@0.5 of 99.40%, F1 score of 98.35%, FPS of 322.58 frame/s, parameters of 7.27 M, model size of 3.97 MB, and GFLOPs of 1.38. Right and left eye temperatures exhibit a strong correlation (r = 0.8076, p < 0.0001), However, the eye temperatures show only very weak correlation with rectal temperature (right eye: r = 0.0852; left eye: r = −0.0359), and neither figure reaches statistical significance. Rectal temperature is 7.37% and 7.69% higher than the right and left eye temperatures, respectively. Additionally, the right eye temperature is slightly higher than the left eye (p < 0.01). The study demonstrates the feasibility of combining IRT and deep learning for non-invasive eye temperature monitoring, although environmental factors may limit it as a proxy for rectal temperature. These results support the development of efficient thermal monitoring tools for precision animal husbandry.
Non-contact body weight (BW) estimation provides a low-stress and low-cost approach for precision beef cattle management, but single-view RGB images may not fully capture body-shape information. This study proposed a practical dual-view RGB framework for cattle BW estimation. A total of 3210 paired top-view and side-view RGB images were collected from 107 Simmental beef cattle with BW ranging from 169 to 980 kg. An EMA-enhanced YOLO11n-seg model was adopted to improve cattle foreground extraction, and a two-stream CBAM-ResNet50-SE network was constructed to learn dorsal and lateral morphological features for BW regression. The EMA-YOLO11n-seg model achieved mAP@0.5 values of 99.18% and 98.35% for top-view and side-view images, respectively. On the test set, the proposed BW estimation model achieved an MAE of 14.96 kg, an RMSE of 17.86 kg, and an R2 of 0.85. The model also showed stable performance across different growth stages and posture conditions. Adaptation experiments using a Sanhe cattle dataset further demonstrated the adaptability of the proposed framework. These results suggest that the practical dual-view RGB framework developed in this study provides an effective solution for non-contact beef cattle BW estimation under fixed image-acquisition conditions.