BEEF CATTLE IDENTIFICATION USING SURF AND OTHER CATTLE IDENTIFICATION METHODS

Various Cattle identification methods are discussed in this paper. Cattle identification methods can be classified into 3, viz. Mechanical methods, Electronic methods and Biometric methods. Tagging, branding and tattoos are most commonly used mechanical methods. Three main electronic identifiers are ear tags, ruminal boluses and injectable transponders. DNA profiling, Iris imaging, Retinal imaging and Muzzle pattern imaging are biometric methods. All these are discussed in this paper with their merits and demerits. Finally beef cattle identification using Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) approach is studied and implemented. This method has higher performance than the previous methods in terms of robustness, distinctiveness, repeatability with higher speed. This is achieved by combining leading detectors (Hessian matrix-based) and descriptors (distribution-based) with the concept of integral image. This results rotation and scale invariant detection, description and matchin