Estimation of Cow’s Body Condition Score from Images

The energy reserves in cows in terms of body fat stores and mobilization during the different lactation stages have important implications for milk production, animal well-being, reproductive performance, and, more generally, farm productivity. This study explores the possibility to efficiently semiautomate the process of body condition scoring using images acquired by commercial low-cost digital cameras. The proposed method has been compared with respect to state-ofthe-art approaches obtaining the best performances for Body Condition Score evaluation.