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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Wanted criminals have already been tracked using biometric imaging, but now an Irish company is targeting dairy cows with a new form of facial recognition.
Irish company Cainthus appears to be ‘raising the steaks’ in facial recognition with an unusual plan to roll out the technology to dairy farms around the world.
The data solutions company based in Dublin has partnered with agriculture giant Cargill to produce a predictive imaging system that can identify cows from their facial features and hide patterns. The software will also provide dairy farmers with data on their animal’s temperature and food intake.
I'm definitely bullish on this idea.
Source: https://www.rt.com/news/417752-cow-facial-recognition-cargill/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday February 05 2018, @07:03PM (3 children)
You can remove RFID tags. Have you tried removing a cow's face without anyone noticing? This is partly to combat crime when cattle and/or other livestock are stolen,
Secondly, you can identify cattle at a distance providing that you can get an acceptable image of its face. A RFID tag is very limited range.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday February 05 2018, @09:16PM
There's a very old Irish drama broadcast by the BBC about Ireland "Ballykissangel" (apparently the name of the village) and one of the more comic plots is the Irish govt implemented old age pensions for farmers by not trying very hard to audit farmers claiming fake sheep subsidy credits and the whacky villagers manufacture sheep out of wood and art supplies for an old guy (which ironically sounds pretty stupid; sheep cost about $200 on the hoof and sculpting art supplies and labor likely exceed $200 for fake sheeps...)
Anyway the point of this funny 80s BBC sitcom story is I"m sure plenty of taxing and farming subsidy authorities will be scanning car and drone and aircraft photos for anomalies.
As a side issue one of the most interesting uses of non-contact visual livestock identification is stuff like health monitoring. Look at old bessie's FitCow graph, she hasn't walked 20 feet today, check and see if she hurt her leg/foot/hoof.
Another fascinating idea applies to self driving cars and visual navigation systems, Oh see that is cow 1247149 so I "know" my self driving car cam is in front of address XYZ. Maybe more fun for self driving tractors.
A final interesting self-driving vehicle topic is you get 20, 30, 40 spy cams watching the farm as your self driving tractor wanders about and the algorithm can put everything together such that it knows you got 75 cows and the fixed monitoring cams have pinpointed all 75 cows and none are about to get run over, so clearly that blur on the self driving tractor camera is the sheepdog or a bear or something non-cow anyway. You could also draw a social network of cows, which must be handy for something (tinder for cows aka cow-der for use as STD tracking, or disease tracking in general, or some creepy "know your meat" for the ultimate hipster cooking experience)
(Score: 2) by Translation Error on Monday February 05 2018, @09:48PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday February 06 2018, @09:22AM