FSCA-YOLO: An Enhanced YOLO-Based Model for Multi-Target Dairy Cow Behavior Recognition

In real-world dairy farming environments, object recognition models often suffer from missed or false detections due to complex backgrounds and cow occlusions. In response to these issues, this paper proposes FSCA-YOLO, a multi-object cow behavior recognition model based on an improved YOLOv11 framework. First, the FEM-SCAM module is introduced along with the CoordAtt mechanism to enable the model to better focus on effective behavioral features of cows while suppressing irrelevant background information. Second, a small object detection head is added to enhance the model's ability to recognize cow behaviors occurring at the distant regions of the camera's field of view. Finally, the original loss function is replaced with the SIoU loss function to improve recognition accuracy and accelerate model convergence. Experimental results show that compared with mainstream object detection models, the improved YOLOv11 in this section demonstrates superior performance in terms of precision, recall, and mean average precision (mAP), achieving 95.7% precision, 92.1% recall, and 94.5% mAP-an improvement of 1.6%, 1.8%, and 2.1%, respectively, over the baseline YOLOv11 model. FSCA-YOLO can accurately extract cow features in real farming environments, providing a reliable vision-based solution for cow behavior recognition. To support specific behavior recognition and in-region counting needs in multi-object cow behavior recognition and tracking systems, OpenCV is integrated with the recognition model, enabling users to meet the diverse behavior identification requirements in groups of cows and improving the model's adaptability and practical utility.