Researchers say a cow’s muzzle is just like its very own fingerprint and as a result they, too, will be able to enter the world of facial recognition.

University of New England researcher Ali Shojaeipour is developing artificial intelligence capable of identifying cattle by their muzzles for his PhD research. It may only be early stages but he said so far, the results were promising.

“The model was tested on 300 individual cattle and was able to identify them with an accuracy of 99,11%. This technology is not limited to a specific breed of cattle, it can be used for various breeds.”

Just like when we unlock our phones, Dr Shojaeipour’s technology simply detects and identifies each animal via its muzzle. He is also building a smartphone application so cattle can be identified via phone cameras.

Getting the technology to work with live cattle moving in yards with dirt and dust is the next step for Dr Shojaeipour. “It still needs more development on a larger scale but I believe we are moving in the right direction,” he said.

“We’ve been able to show that livestock biometric monitoring could potentially be used in future agriculture decision support systems for resource management at multiple scales of production.”