Enhanced Wavelet-Convolution and Few-Shot Prototype-Driven Framework for Incremental Identification of Holstein Cattle.

Individual identification of Holstein cattle is crucial for the intelligent management of farms. The existing closed-set identification models are inadequate for breeding scenarios where new individuals continually join, and they are highly sensitive to obstructions and alterations in the cattle's appearance, such as back defacement. The current open-set identification methods exhibit low discriminatory stability for new individuals. These limitations significantly hinder the application and promotion of the model. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a prototype network-based incremental identification framework for Holstein cattle to achieve stable identification of new individuals under small sample conditions. Firstly, we design a feature extraction network, ResWTA, which integrates wavelet convolution with a spatial attention mechanism. This design enhances the model's response to low-level features by adjusting the convolutional receptive field, thereby improving its feature extraction capabilities. Secondly, we construct a few-shot augmented prototype network to bolster the framework's robustness for incremental identification. Lastly, we systematically evaluate the effects of various loss functions, prototype computation methods, and distance metrics on identification performance. The experimental results indicate that utilizing ResWTA as the feature extraction network achieves a top-1 accuracy of 97.43% and a top-5 accuracy of 99.54%. Furthermore, introducing the few-shot augmented prototype network enhances the top-1 accuracy by 4.77%. When combined with the Triplet loss function and the Manhattan distance metric, the identification accuracy of the framework can reach up to 94.33%. Notably, this combination reduces the incremental learning forgetfulness by 4.89% compared to the baseline model, while improving the average incremental accuracy by 2.4%. The proposed method not only facilitates incremental identification of Holstein cattle but also significantly bolsters the robustness of the identification process, thereby providing effective technical support for intelligent farm management.