Open Set Sheep Face Recognition Based on Euclidean Space Metric

As the essential content of intelligent animal husbandry, identifying each livestock is the only way to achieve modern and refined scientific husbandry. This paper proposes a sheep face recognition method based on European spatial metrics and realizes noncontact sheep identity recognition by training the network using sheep face image samples in the natural environment. The SheepBase data set was first proposed in this process, which contains 6559 images of Inner Mongolia fine-wool sheep and Sunite sheep. To enhance the diversity of the data, the sheep face images were data-enhanced. Secondly, to solve the problems of more redundant information in the sheep face image and the poor posture and angle of the sheep face, we propose the sheep face detection and correction (SheepFaceRepair) method. This method aims to detect the sheep face area in the image to be recognized and align the sheep face area. On this basis, we offer an open sheep facial recognition network (SheepFaceNet) based on the European spatial metric. This method incorporates the biological identity information features of the sheep face to achieve sheep identity. We also tested the effectiveness of this method in the SheepBase data set. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper is much higher than the other methods, and the precision of recognition reaches 89.12%. In addition, we found that integrating the biometrics of the sheep face can effectively improve the network’s recognition capacity.