What if you could look into a cow’s face and know whether it had a fever? A new tool from the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision Lab at the University of Arkansas uses artificial intelligence and thermal cameras to estimate the body temperature of cattle.
The system, called CattleFever, is the first step toward automated tools that ranchers could use to monitor the health of their herd. A paper describing this tool is published in the journal Smart Agricultural Technology.
Trong Thang Pham, a doctoral student at the U of A, was the primary researcher on the project. The AICV lab is led by Ngan Le, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who researches medical imaging, computer vision and robotics.
Today, cattle’s temperature is measured rectally, a process that can stress the animal. The CattleFever system could both improve animal welfare and reduce the labor needed to track a herd’s health. The technology could help ranchers detect diseases before symptoms appear, leading to earlier treatment and preventing outbreaks.
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