Marco Huber, Marco Kiesewalter, Judith Louise Pieper +2cs.CV
With the development of precision livestock farming and the advances in computer vision, visual animal biometrics has gained attention. Using biometric technologies that have been proven effective for humans to identify livestock can increase animal welfare as well as production efficiency. However, challenges such as complex scenarios, similar appearances, occlusions, and non-cooperative behavior, as well as the limited amount of publicly available labeled datasets, remain. In this work, we contribute a novel, publicly available cow face benchmark dataset that has been collected in a realistic automatic scenario with 6,838 images of 161 different cows at a dairy farm. In addition to the public dataset, we define two verification and four identification evaluation protocols to foster comparable research in the cow recognition research field. Further, we provide evaluation results on our dataset of six benchmark models, which include models trained on limited data, cross-species fine-tuned models, and zero-shot foundation model approaches.
The International StepUP Competition Series was launched to advance research in pressure-based footstep biometrics through a standardized and challenging evaluation framework. Using the large-scale StepUP-P150 dataset (with more than 200,000 high-resolution dynamic footsteps from 150 individuals) and a previously unreleased test set, the 2nd edition of the competition addressed three key challenges: (1) generalization to unseen users with limited enrollment data, (2) robustness to domain shift caused by variations in footwear and walking speed and (3) effective fusion of paired left-right footsteps. While the first two challenges built on the inaugural competition, this edition introduced more extreme cross-domain conditions and moved beyond isolated footsteps to stride-level verification, enabling new opportunities for representation learning and inter-step information fusion. The competition attracted 26 registrants from academia and industry, with a best equal error rate of 8.00% achieved by the ArogyaPandit Research Team using a spatiotemporal CNN combined with an ensemble-based scoring strategy. The top solutions showcase the value of harnessing temporal patterns and of incorporating inference-time normalization and calibration strategies to improve scoring. However, the results also reveal that recognizing users in unseen personal footwear remains a challenge, especially in the presence of distractors with similar characteristics.