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Main Authors: Wang, Runcheng, Chen, Yaru, Zhang, Guiguo, Jiang, Honghua, Qiao, Yongliang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07566
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author Wang, Runcheng
Chen, Yaru
Zhang, Guiguo
Jiang, Honghua
Qiao, Yongliang
author_facet Wang, Runcheng
Chen, Yaru
Zhang, Guiguo
Jiang, Honghua
Qiao, Yongliang
contents Precise identification of individual cows is a fundamental prerequisite for comprehensive digital management in smart livestock farming. While existing animal identification methods excel in controlled, single-camera settings, they face severe challenges regarding cross-camera generalization. When models trained on source cameras are deployed to new monitoring nodes characterized by divergent illumination, backgrounds, viewpoints, and heterogeneous imaging properties, recognition performance often degrades dramatically. This limits the large-scale application of non-contact technologies in dynamic, real-world farming environments. To address this challenge, this study proposes a cross-camera cow identification framework based on disentangled representation learning. This framework leverages the Subspace Identifiability Guarantee (SIG) theory in the context of bovine visual recognition. By modeling the underlying physical data generation process, we designed a principle-driven feature disentanglement module that decomposes observed images into multiple orthogonal latent subspaces. This mechanism effectively isolates stable, identity-related biometric features that remain invariant across cameras, thereby substantially improving generalization to unseen cameras. We constructed a high-quality dataset spanning five distinct camera nodes, covering heterogeneous acquisition devices and complex variations in lighting and angles. Extensive experiments across seven cross-camera tasks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 86.0%, significantly outperforming the Source-only Baseline (51.9%) and the strongest cross-camera baseline method (79.8%). This work establishes a subspace-theoretic feature disentanglement framework for collaborative cross-camera cow identification, offering a new paradigm for precise animal monitoring in uncontrolled smart farming environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-Camera Cow Identification via Disentangled Representation Learning
Wang, Runcheng
Chen, Yaru
Zhang, Guiguo
Jiang, Honghua
Qiao, Yongliang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Precise identification of individual cows is a fundamental prerequisite for comprehensive digital management in smart livestock farming. While existing animal identification methods excel in controlled, single-camera settings, they face severe challenges regarding cross-camera generalization. When models trained on source cameras are deployed to new monitoring nodes characterized by divergent illumination, backgrounds, viewpoints, and heterogeneous imaging properties, recognition performance often degrades dramatically. This limits the large-scale application of non-contact technologies in dynamic, real-world farming environments. To address this challenge, this study proposes a cross-camera cow identification framework based on disentangled representation learning. This framework leverages the Subspace Identifiability Guarantee (SIG) theory in the context of bovine visual recognition. By modeling the underlying physical data generation process, we designed a principle-driven feature disentanglement module that decomposes observed images into multiple orthogonal latent subspaces. This mechanism effectively isolates stable, identity-related biometric features that remain invariant across cameras, thereby substantially improving generalization to unseen cameras. We constructed a high-quality dataset spanning five distinct camera nodes, covering heterogeneous acquisition devices and complex variations in lighting and angles. Extensive experiments across seven cross-camera tasks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 86.0%, significantly outperforming the Source-only Baseline (51.9%) and the strongest cross-camera baseline method (79.8%). This work establishes a subspace-theoretic feature disentanglement framework for collaborative cross-camera cow identification, offering a new paradigm for precise animal monitoring in uncontrolled smart farming environments.
title Cross-Camera Cow Identification via Disentangled Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07566