{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,11,4]],"date-time":"2026-11-04T00:55:01Z","timestamp":1793753701174,"version":"4.6.1"},"reference-count":38,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"8","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,9]],"date-time":"2026-04-09T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1775692800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Graduate Research and Innovation Project","award":["KC2025015S"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KC2025015S"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["61966026"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61966026"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["61966026"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61966026"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01h0zpd94","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Higher Education Youth Science and Technology Talent Support Program","award":["NJYT23063"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["NJYT23063"]}]},{"name":"Foundation for the Central Government to Guide Local Science and Technology Development","award":["2024ZY0147"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2024ZY0147"]}]},{"name":"Research Startup Project for Young Academic Talents of Inner Mongolia University","award":["10000-A25299042 and 10000-A23299030"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["10000-A25299042 and 10000-A23299030"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004763","name":"Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["2024MS06012"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2024MS06012"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004763","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Science and Technology Breakthrough Project","award":["S-2025SKJTW0111"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["S-2025SKJTW0111"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Animals"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Accurate and scalable body condition scoring (BCS) is important for health monitoring and productivity management in precision livestock farming. However, manual scoring is subjective, labor-intensive, and difficult to standardize, while many automated methods are too computationally demanding for edge deployment in real farm environments. This study proposes EdgeBCS-YOLO, a lightweight object detection framework for real-time beef cattle BCS in unstructured farming scenarios. Built on YOLO11n, it combines Position-Sensitive Feature Fusion (PSFF), a Texture-Aware Star Module (TASM), an Efficient Grouped Detection Head (EGDH), and a Focal and Global Knowledge Distillation (FGD)-based distillation strategy. On a dynamic blurring dataset, EdgeBCS-YOLO achieved 90.8% precision, 82.7% recall, and 88.9% mAP@50. On the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX Super, it achieved a model size of 3.95 MB, a system FPS of 33.35, and an average inference latency of 13.26 ms. These results suggest that it is a practical and potentially efficient solution for automated BCS on edge devices.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/ani16081143","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,9]],"date-time":"2026-04-09T12:21:32Z","timestamp":1775737292000},"page":"1143","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Real-Time Beef Cattle Body Condition Scoring Using EdgeBCS-YOLO: A Lightweight Framework for Edge Deployment"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Zitian","family":"Liu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010070, China"},{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Regulation & Breeding of Grassland Livestock, Hohhot 010030, China"},{"name":"Full Mechanization Research Base of Dairy Farming Engineering and Equipment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People\u2019s Republic of China, Hohhot 010018, China"},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Intelligent Communication and Sensing and Signal Processing, Hohhot 010070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8102-6875","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhi","family":"Weng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010070, China"},{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Regulation & Breeding of Grassland Livestock, Hohhot 010030, China"},{"name":"Full Mechanization Research Base of Dairy Farming Engineering and Equipment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People\u2019s Republic of China, Hohhot 010018, China"},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Intelligent Communication and Sensing and Signal Processing, Hohhot 010070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-8059-4513","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhiqiang","family":"Zheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010070, China"},{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Regulation & Breeding of Grassland Livestock, Hohhot 010030, China"},{"name":"Full Mechanization Research Base of Dairy Farming Engineering and Equipment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People\u2019s Republic of China, Hohhot 010018, China"},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Intelligent Communication and Sensing and Signal Processing, Hohhot 010070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Caili","family":"Gong","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010070, China"},{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Regulation & Breeding of Grassland Livestock, Hohhot 010030, China"},{"name":"Full Mechanization Research Base of Dairy Farming Engineering and Equipment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People\u2019s Republic of China, Hohhot 010018, China"},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Intelligent Communication and Sensing and Signal Processing, Hohhot 010070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0006-8255-5086","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhuangzhuang","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010070, China"},{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Regulation & Breeding of Grassland Livestock, Hohhot 010030, China"},{"name":"Full Mechanization Research Base of Dairy Farming Engineering and Equipment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People\u2019s Republic of China, Hohhot 010018, China"},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Intelligent Communication and Sensing and Signal Processing, Hohhot 010070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jun","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010070, China"},{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Regulation & Breeding of Grassland Livestock, Hohhot 010030, China"},{"name":"Full Mechanization Research Base of Dairy Farming Engineering and Equipment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People\u2019s Republic of China, Hohhot 010018, China"},{"name":"Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Intelligent Communication and Sensing and Signal Processing, Hohhot 010070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Eversole, D., Browne, M., Hall, J., and Dietz, R. 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