{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,8]],"date-time":"2026-09-08T10:12:02Z","timestamp":1788862322792,"version":"build-2803163510"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,8]],"date-time":"2026-09-08T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1788825600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100003062","name":"Erciyes University","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["TYL-2025-13781"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["TYL-2025-13781"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100003062","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["TYL-2025-13781"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["TYL-2025-13781"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/047g8vk19","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Vet. Sci.","Veterinary Sciences"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Individual cattle identification is essential for traceability and precision livestock management, but conventional identifiers may be lost or damaged. This study evaluated a non-invasive biometric framework based on PN images. A two-stage pipeline combined a YOLOv12n detector for muzzle localization with an ImageNet-pretrained EfficientNetB0 classifier for individual identification. Forty-eight cattle (32 adult cows and 16 calves) were photographed on 31 January 2025 (T0) and again on 11 June 2025 (T1), a 131-day interval. Four images per animal were obtained at each session, producing 384 longitudinal images. The detector-development dataset comprised 565 original images from cattle sampled independently at a slaughterhouse and 210 public Zenodo images, with no animal- or image-level overlap with the longitudinal dataset. The 775 detector images were randomly partitioned at image level into training (n = 543), validation (n = 116), and test (n = 116) subsets before augmentation; online augmentation was applied only to the training subset. Muzzle detection achieved precision of 0.890, recall of 0.978, and mAP@0.5 of 0.982. The muzzle was localized in all validation and test images, with a reported mean intersection over union of 0.96. All T1 images were excluded from model development and used as an independent closed-set temporal test, yielding 96.3% overall re-identification accuracy. End-to-end inference required 8.3 ms per image on an NVIDIA L4 GPU. The results support short-term retention of discriminative PN characteristics, including in a cohort containing growing calves, and indicate that PN imaging may serve as a complementary cattle-identification tool.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/vetsci13090924","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,8]],"date-time":"2026-09-08T09:02:24Z","timestamp":1788858144000},"page":"924","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Short-Term Longitudinal Biometric Identification of Cattle Using Planum Nasolabiale Images and a Two-Stage Deep Learning Framework"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"13","author":[{"given":"Selahattin Ozan","family":"Yard\u0131mc\u0131","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Anatomy, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Erciyes University, 38280 Talas, Kayseri, T\u00fcrkiye"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"data-curation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"investigation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"methodology","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0000-4450-0371","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"\u0130mdat","family":"Orhan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Anatomy, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Erciyes University, 38280 Talas, Kayseri, T\u00fcrkiye"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"conceptualization","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"methodology","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"project-administration","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"supervision","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-review-editing","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"given":"Fatih \u0130smail","family":"Bahar","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Erciyes University, 38280 Talas, Kayseri, T\u00fcrkiye"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"data-curation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"software","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"formal-analysis","vocabulary":"credit"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"510","DOI":"10.20506\/rst.20.2.1291","article-title":"Traceability in cattle and small ruminants in Canada","volume":"20","author":"Stanford","year":"2001","journal-title":"Rev. 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