Cattle-CLIP: A Multimodal Framework for Cattle Behaviour Recognition

Abstract

Cattle behaviour is a crucial indicator of an individual animal health, productivity and overall well-being. Video-based monitoring, combined with deep learning techniques, has become a mainstream approach in animal biometrics, and it can offer high accuracy in some behaviour recognition tasks. We present Cattle-CLIP, a multimodal deep learning framework for cattle behaviour recognition, using semantic cues to improve the performance of video-based visual feature recognition. It is adapted from the large-scale image-language model CLIP by adding a temporal integration module. To address the domain gap between web data used for the pre-trained model and real-world cattle surveillance footage, we introduce tailored data augmentation strategies and specialised text prompts. Cattle-CLIP is evaluated under both fully-supervised and few-shot learning scenarios, with a particular focus on data-scarce behaviour recognition - an important yet under-explored goal in livestock monitoring. To evaluate the proposed method, we release the CattleBehaviours6 dataset, which comprises six types of indoor behaviours: feeding, drinking, standing-self-grooming, standing-ruminating, lying-self-grooming and lying-ruminating. The dataset consists of 1905 clips collected from our John Oldacre Centre dairy farm research platform housing 200 Holstein-Friesian cows. Experiments show that Cattle-CLIP achieves 96.1% overall accuracy across six behaviours in a supervised setting, with nearly 100% recall for feeding, drinking and standing-ruminating behaviours, and demonstrates robust generalisation with limited data in few-shot scenarios, highlighting the potential of multimodal learning in agricultural and animal behaviour analysis.