Identifying Cows by Muzzle Prints

Jul-05-15 Egyptian researchers have developed a biometric system for identifying cows based on their muzzle prints, offering a new way for ranchers to keep track of their cattle.

Since meat is part of the global food supply, keeping track of cattle and their origins is serious business. Previous methods of identifying cows have included branding, ear tags, barcodes and implanted RFID tags.

Reaching back into history a bit, the team drew on the knowledge that ink prints of cows’ muzzles had once been a way to keep track of the animals. Bringing technology onto the scene, the team gathered close-up images of the muzzles and crunched them through a machine learning system able to classify the images based on their patterns. In tests, the system was able to use the muzzle prints to correctly identify the cows with 94 percent accuracy.

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