DK-EffiPointMLP: An Efficient 3D Dorsal Point Cloud Network for Individual Identification of Pigs

Accurate non-contact individual identification of pigs is crucial for their intelligent and efficient management. However, traditional recognition technologies generally suffer from weak local feature expression, feature redundancy, and insufficient channel importance modeling. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel network model, DK-EffiPointMLP, for individual identification based on 3D dorsal point clouds. The model integrates a Dual-branch Local Feature enhancement module (DLF) and an Efficient Partial Convolution-Residual Refinement module (EffiConv). Specifically, the DLF module adopts a dual-branch structure of KNN and dilated KNN to expand the receptive field, while the EffiConv module combines 1D convolution with the SE mechanism to strengthen key channel modeling. To evaluate the model, a dataset of 10 individual pigs with 8411 samples was constructed. Experimental results show that DK-EffiPointMLP achieves accuracies of 96.86% on this self-built dataset and 95.2% on ModelNet40. When re-training all baseline models under the same pipeline and preprocessing protocols, our model outperformed existing mainstream models by 2.74 and 1.1 percentage points, respectively. This approach provides an efficient solution for automated management in commercial farming.