Division of Cow Production Groups Based on SOLOv2 and Improved CNN-LSTM

Udder conformation traits interact with cow milk yield, and it is essential to study the udder characteristics at different levels of production to predict milk yield for managing cows on farms. This study aims to develop an effective method based on instance segmentation and an improved neural network to divide cow production groups according to udders of high- and low-yielding cows. Firstly, the SOLOv2 (Segmenting Objects by LOcations) method was utilized to finely segment the cow udders. Secondly, feature extraction and data processing were conducted to define several cow udder features. Finally, the improved CNN-LSTM (Convolution Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory) neural network was adopted to classify high- and low-yielding udders. The research compared the improved CNN-LSTM model and the other five classifiers, and the results show that CNN-LSTM achieved an overall accuracy of 96.44%. The proposed method indicates that the SOLOv2 and CNN-LSTM methods combined with analysis of udder traits have the potential for assigning cows to different production groups.