Cow Facial Recognition Becoming a Reality, Set to Revolutionize Farming

If you think facial recognition is amazing, think of what happens if cows could do it too. Scientists are making the technology to identify cows, which also have their own unique set of facial features.

According to Dairy Global, Cainthus is the "only" company in the world that can facilitate visual recognition on cows. 

Cainthus, based in Dublin, Ottawa and Francisco, is a budding machine vision company that has the technology to turn visual information into actionable data.

Their current focus is on improving agriculture, regardless if their technology's end-use has great potential.

According to Tech Republic, David Hunt is the co-founder of Cainthus along with his brother Ross. They aim to digitise agricultural practices with one of their goals is to develop facial recognition technology for cows.

Hunt said they're the only company in the world that can ID a cow using facial recognition, with a 97 percent accuracy in ID on an individual image.

They have also done their first commercial sale and installation, and they are prioritising larger dairies of "over 1,000 cows," as this is where their system makes the best impact.

Hunt said their mission to create an effective cow recognition system stemmed from the realization that one of the big problems in the industry is a lack of scale measurement.

They added that this can make things difficult to improve within the industry, as not being able to accurately measure something makes it hard to improve them. They then saw that imaging sensors turned out to be the cheapest way to provide commercial scale measurement for agricultural fields.

Hunt added that robotics in this scale and be a solution to a decreasing labour force, adding that the combination of advanced sensor data and analytics can make a platform capable of making constant "small" interventions to ensure productivity.

Hunt also said it's perfectly natural for farmers to feel both excited and skeptical on the new technology. According to SMH, Hunt said farmers may be skeptical about the new technology because of the amount of risks present, but he said their technology can contribute more than just letting know when cows "stop feeding."

Regardless, Hunt thinks this technology could make farms more of a mixed enterprise in the future. By 2050, Hunt thinks farms will be mixed and use agro-ecology style systems with many different crops and livestock.