Computer Vision for Cattle Health and Welfare Monitoring: A Comprehensive Review of Methods, Applications, and Interdisciplinary Integration in Smart Agriculture.

The global cattle industry is experiencing significant growth, requiring advanced methods for monitoring animal health and welfare to ensure productivity and sustainability. Traditional manual monitoring techniques are labor-intensive and often impractical for large-scale operations. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of existing and emerging computer vision tools applied to the monitoring of cattle health and welfare. By systematically examining studies across major databases, this paper addresses six key research questions focusing on (1) the issues addressed by computer vision technologies, (2) data acquisition systems, (3) implemented techniques and algorithms, (4) performance outcomes, (5) challenges faced, and (6) potential applications for underexplored health and welfare aspects in cattle farming. The findings show that computer vision technologies have significantly progressed in areas such as body condition score detection, lameness detection, weight estimation, estrus detection, monitoring of feeding and drinking behavior, breathing detection, and recognition of general behaviors. Despite the progress, challenges such as variability in environmental conditions, the need for large annotated datasets, and the high cost of advanced imaging equipment persist. The review emphasizes future research opportunities to address these challenges by focusing on disease-specific monitoring. This review aims to provide veterinarians, farmers, and animal health professionals with greater insight into computer vision technologies and to promote their adoption by discussing their practical applications.