{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,17]],"date-time":"2026-05-17T08:26:29Z","timestamp":1779006389737,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":34,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,8]],"date-time":"2024-05-08T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1715126400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004826","name":"Beijing Natural Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["4242037"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["4242037"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004826","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004826","name":"Beijing Natural Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["QNJJ202309"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["QNJJ202309"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004826","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004826","name":"Beijing Natural Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["KJCX20230204"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KJCX20230204"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004826","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Youth Fund of the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry","award":["4242037"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["4242037"]}]},{"name":"Youth Fund of the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry","award":["QNJJ202309"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["QNJJ202309"]}]},{"name":"Youth Fund of the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry","award":["KJCX20230204"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KJCX20230204"]}]},{"name":"Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry\u2019s Special Programme for Capacity Building in Science and Technology Innovation","award":["4242037"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["4242037"]}]},{"name":"Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry\u2019s Special Programme for Capacity Building in Science and Technology Innovation","award":["QNJJ202309"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["QNJJ202309"]}]},{"name":"Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry\u2019s Special Programme for Capacity Building in Science and Technology Innovation","award":["KJCX20230204"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KJCX20230204"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Within the current process of large-scale dairy-cattle breeding, to address the problems of low recognition-accuracy and significant recognition-error associated with existing visual methods, we propose a method for recognizing the feeding behavior of dairy cows, one based on an improved RefineMask instance-segmentation model, and using high-quality detection and segmentation results to realize the recognition of the feeding behavior of dairy cows. Firstly, the input features are better extracted by incorporating the convolutional block attention module into the residual module of the feature extraction network. Secondly, an efficient channel attention module is incorporated into the neck design to achieve efficient integration of feature extraction while avoiding the surge of parameter volume computation. Subsequently, the GIoU loss function is used to increase the area of the prediction frame to optimize the convergence speed of the loss function, thus improving the regression accuracy. Finally, the logic of using mask information to recognize foraging behavior was designed, and the accurate recognition of foraging behavior was achieved according to the segmentation results of the model. We constructed, trained, and tested a cow dataset consisting of 1000 images from 50 different individual cows at peak feeding times. The method\u2019s effectiveness, robustness, and accuracy were verified by comparing it with example segmentation algorithms such as MSRCNN, Point_Rend, Cascade_Mask, and ConvNet_V2. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the improved RefineMask algorithm in recognizing the bounding box and accurately determining the segmentation mask is 98.3%, which is higher than that of the benchmark model by 0.7 percentage points; for this, the model parameter count size was 49.96 M, which meets the practical needs of local deployment. In addition, the technologies under study performed well in a variety of scenarios and adapted to various light environments; this research can provide technical support for the analysis of the relationship between cow feeding behavior and feed intake during peak feeding periods.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s24102975","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,8]],"date-time":"2024-05-08T03:23:19Z","timestamp":1715138599000},"page":"2975","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":4,"title":["Multi-Target Feeding-Behavior Recognition Method for Cows Based on Improved RefineMask"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"24","author":[{"given":"Xuwen","family":"Li","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Agricultural University, Tianjin 300384, China"},{"name":"Research Center of Information Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1839-8147","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ronghua","family":"Gao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Agricultural University, Tianjin 300384, China"},{"name":"Research Center of Information Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Qifeng","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Agricultural University, Tianjin 300384, China"},{"name":"Research Center of Information Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2977-3325","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Rong","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Research Center of Information Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China"},{"name":"College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Xianyang 712100, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Shanghao","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Research Center of Information Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China"},{"name":"College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Xianyang 712100, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Weiwei","family":"Huang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Agricultural University, Tianjin 300384, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Liuyiyi","family":"Yang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Research Center of Information Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China"},{"name":"College of Intelligent Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Agriculture, Beijing 100096, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Zhenyuan","family":"Zhuo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Research Center of Information Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China"},{"name":"College of Intelligent Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Agriculture, Beijing 100096, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"331","DOI":"10.1016\/j.anireprosci.2006.08.011","article-title":"A herd health approach to dairy cow nutrition and production diseases of the transition cow","volume":"96","author":"Mulligan","year":"2006","journal-title":"Anim. 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