Crop pests and diseases are one of the most critical disasters that limit agricultural production. In this paper, we trained a lightweight convolutional neural network model and built a Django framework-based potato disease leaf recognition system, which can recognize three types of potato leaf images including early blight, late blight, and healthy. A lightweight, neural network-based model for the identification of early potato leaf diseases significantly reduces the number of model parameters, whereas the accuracy of Top-1 identification is over 93%. We imported the trained model into the Django framework to build a website for a potato early leaf disease identification system, thus providing technical support for the implementation of a mobile-based potato leaf disease identification and early warning system.
The large-scale and precise intelligent breeding mode for dairy cows is the main direction for the development of the dairy industry. Machine vision has become an important technological means for the intelligent breeding of dairy cows due to its non-invasive, low-cost, and multi-behavior recognition capabilities. This review summarizes the recent application of machine vision technology, machine learning, and deep learning in the main behavior recognition of dairy cows. The authors summarized identity recognition technology based on facial features, muzzle prints, and body features of dairy cows; motion behavior recognition technology such as lying, standing, walking, drinking, eating, rumination, estrus; and the recognition of common diseases such as lameness and mastitis. Based on current research results, machine vision technology will become one of the important technological means for the intelligent breeding of dairy cows. Finally, the author also summarized the advantages of this technology in intelligent dairy farming, as well as the problems and challenges faced in the next development.
In recent years, traditional farming methods have been increasingly replaced by more modern, intelligent farming techniques. This shift towards information and intelligence in farming is becoming a trend. When they are bitten by dinoflagellates, cows display stress behaviors, including tail wagging, head tossing, leg kicking, ear flapping, and skin fluttering. The study of cow protective behavior can indirectly reveal the health status of cows and their living patterns under different environmental conditions, allowing for the evaluation of the breeding environment and animal welfare status. In this study, we generated key point feature marker information using the DeepLabCut target detection algorithm and constructed the spatial relationship of cow feature marker points to detect the cow’s protective behavior based on the change in key elements of the cow’s head swinging and walking performance. The algorithm can detect the protective behavior of cows, with the detection accuracy reaching the level of manual detection. The next step in the research focuses on analyzing the differences in protective behaviors of cows in different environments, which can help in cow breed selection. It is an important guide for diagnosing the health status of cows and improving milk production in a practical setting.
Air quality level has a complex nonlinear relationship with air pollutant and meteorological conditions, including multiple factors, overlapping information, and difficulty solving equations. In order to identify significant factors, remove correlations, reduce data dimensionality, and simplify the model structure, a BP neural network model for air quality level prediction optimized by stepwise discriminant analysis (STEPDISC) and principal component analysis (PCA) is proposed with 12 factors of historical daily meteorology and air pollutants in Bayannur city as samples. The results showed that, at the significance level of 0.01, the STEPDISC method retained 9 significant impact factors. The PCA method made an orthogonal linear combination of the 9 factors to form the principal components, and the contribution of the top 5 principal components were 37.6%, 19.2%, 15.3%, 8.8%, and 7.7%. At a contribution threshold of 0.85, the top 5 principal component scores were used as input nodes to construct the STEPDISC-PCA-BP model, which had a prediction accuracy of 85.5%.Compared with the PCA-BP and BP model, which had a prediction accuracy of 61.8% and 56.7%, respectively, the STEPDISC-PCA-BP model has a higher prediction accuracy, shorter time, and lower complexity of structure and data dimensionality, and can provide the necessary technical support for the local air quality improvement.
Accurate monitoring of cattle behavioral time budgets is crucial for early disease detection and welfare assessment. Changes in durations of standing, lying, and eating are known to be early indicators of health issues such as lameness and metabolic disorders. To enable low-cost, non-invasive, and real-time monitoring, this study proposes a lightweight cattle behavior recognition method based on an improved YOLO11n architecture. The model enhances multi-scale feature integration through a generalized efficient layer aggregation network (GELAN), improves feature extraction via a multidimensional collaborative attention (MCA) mechanism, and achieves efficient cross-scale fusion using a bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN). Depthwise separable convolution (DWConv) is incorporated to reduce computational load. Experimental results demonstrate high recognition accuracy, with mAP@0.5 values of 91.2%, 91.0%, and 93.9% for standing, lying, and eating, respectively. The model was subsequently compressed using a Layer-adaptive Magnitude-based Pruning (LAMP) algorithm, resulting in a final model of only 1.06 × 106 parameters, a computational cost of 6.3 GFLOPS, and a weight size of 2.4 MB, while retaining 90.7% mAP@0.5. This highly efficient system is suitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, providing a practical tool for continuous cattle monitoring. It offers a viable pathway for farmers to adopt precision livestock farming practices, facilitating early health intervention and promoting animal welfare.
The Body Condition Score (BCS) is a key indicator of dairy cattle’s health, production efficiency, and environmental impact. Manual BCS assessment is subjective and time-consuming, limiting its scalability in precision agriculture. This study utilizes computer vision to automatically assess cattle body condition by analyzing tail features, categorizing BCS into five levels (3.25, 3.50, 3.75, 4.0, 4.25). SE attention improves feature selection by adjusting channel importance, while spatial attention enhances spatial information processing by focusing on key image regions. EfficientNet-B0, enhanced by SE and spatial attention mechanisms, improves feature extraction and localization. To facilitate edge device deployment, model distillation reduces the size from 23.8 MB to 8.7 MB, improving inference speed and storage efficiency. After distillation, the model achieved 91.10% accuracy, 91.14% precision, 91.10% recall, and 91.10% F1 score. The accuracy increased to 97.57% for ±0.25 BCS error and 99.72% for ±0.5 error. This model saves space and meets real-time monitoring requirements, making it suitable for edge devices with limited resources. This research provides an efficient, scalable method for automated livestock health monitoring, supporting intelligent animal husbandry development.