IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL.
72, 2023
Pig Face Recognition Based on Trapezoid
Normalized Pixel Difference Feature and
Trimmed Mean Attention Mechanism
Shuiqing Xu , Member, IEEE, Qihang He , Songbing Tao , Hongtian Chen , Member, IEEE,
Yi Chai , and Weixing Zheng , Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— Pig face recognition has a wide range of applica-
tions in breeding farms, including precision feeding and disease
surveillance. This article proposes a method to guarantee its
performance in complex environments such as with dirty faces
and in unconstrained outdoor conditions. First, inspired by the
shape of the pig face, a trapezoid normalized pixel difference
(T-NPD) feature is designed to achieve more accurate detection
in unconstrained outdoor conditions. Subsequently, a trimmed
mean attention mechanism (TMAM) uses the trimmed mean-
based squeeze method to assign more precise weights to feature
channels, and then fuses it into a 50-layer ResNet (ResNet50)
backbone network to classify detected pig face images with high
accuracy. In addition, the TMAM can be applied in numerous
common networks due to its universality. Finally, comprehensive
experiments conducted on the publicly available JD pig face
dataset indicate that the proposed method has superior perfor-
mance compared with other methods, with an overall accuracy
of 95.06%.
Index Terms— Attention mechanism, pig face detection, pig
face recognition, trapezoid normalized pixel difference (T-NPD)
feature, trimmed mean.
I. I NTRODUCTION
P IG face recognition has an essential role in pig iden-
tification and traceability, and fulfills a wide range of
demands in breeding farms [1]. For example, it enables the
rapid isolation of pigs suffering from swine fever virus, so as to
limit its transmission [2]. Combined with behavior detection,
Manuscript received 10 August 2022; revised 2 November 2022; accepted
3 December 2022. Date of publication 26 December 2022; date of current
version 11 January 2023. This work was supported in part by the National
Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62273128, Grant 61803140,
and Grant U2034209; in part by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
under Grant 2020M682474; and in part by the Nantong Basic Science
Research Project under Grant JC12022068. The Associate Editor coordinating
the review process was Dr. Min Xia. (Corresponding author: Hongtian Chen.)
Shuiqing Xu, Qihang He, and Songbing Tao are with the College of
Electrical Engineering and Automation, Hefei University of Technology,
Hefei 230009, China (e-mail: xsqanhui91@gmail.com; 1614672098@qq.com;
taosongbing@gmail.com).
Hongtian Chen is with the Department of Chemical and Materials Engi-
neering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 1H9, Canada (e-mail:
chtbaylor@163.com).
Yi Chai is with the State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment
and System Security and New Technology, Chongqing University, Chongqing
400044, China (e-mail: chaiyi@cqu.edu.cn).
Weixing Zheng is with the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathe-
matics, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia (e-mail:
w.zheng@westernsydney.edu.au).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2022.3232093
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3500713
it can enable precision feeding by identifying the health status
of individual pigs [3]. Hence, pig face recognition has great
significance and application value.
Several methods for individual pig identification and trace-
ability have been proposed. One of the earliest is manual color
marking, where each pig is painted with a different color,
which is compared with a sample library to obtain a pig’s
identity number [4]. This is physically harmful to the pig and
time-consuming for farmers. Radio frequency identification
(RFID) [5] is achieved through an ear tag, but it has only
achieved 88.6% accuracy, even at close range, and is costly,
as each pig requires a tag [6].
Deep learning methods based on convolutional neural net-
works (CNNs) have enjoyed great success in the domain
of image classification [7], [8], [9], and some related meth-
ods have been used for pig face recognition. For example,
a shallow CNN consisting of six convolutional layers with
alternating dropout and max-pooling layers was designed for
pig face recognition [10]. However, this study required the pig
face image to be painted to achieve manual features, which
is time-consuming in practice. A Haar cascade classifier was
used to detect the pig faces, and an improved shallow CNN to
classify them [11]. This method only achieved 83% accuracy
in a ten-category pig classification experiment, and was mainly
suitable for frontal pig face recognition, without considering
the profile. Faster R-CNN and a shallow CNN with a residual
module were cascaded to achieve front and profile pig face
recognition [12]. However, it was conducted in a constrained
environment with few background disturbances. The above
methods were mainly implemented for relatively clean pig
faces in constrained indoor conditions. But there are many
farms where pigs live in unconstrained outdoor scenes, where
the environment is changeable and the pig’s face is very dirty.
In such circumstances, these methods may encounter difficulty
in achieving excellent pig face recognition results. In addition
to the application of the above CNNs, attention mechanisms
have also received extensive attention in image classification
and face recognition tasks [13], [14], [15]. For example,
SENet [16] first introduced squeeze and excitation operations
for assigning weights to different channels, which can improve
the accuracy of image classification. A novel attention mech-
anism was designed to incorporate into MobileNet for cattle
face recognition [17]. The global and part feature deep network
3500713
model (GPN) was combined with an attention mechanism to
perform cattle face re-identification [18]. Nevertheless, these
attention mechanisms are currently mainly applied to the
recognition of human or cattle faces, and the application in
pig face recognition needs further exploration.
Face recognition of other animals has attracted attention.
Inception-V3 was adopted to extract cattle face features from
a rear-view video dataset, and these features were used to train
a long short-term memory model to identify each individual
cattle [19]. Other cattle face recognition methods, including
PnasNet-5 [20], VGG-16 [21], and CattleFaceNet [22], have
been well studied. Sheep face recognition has also been
studied. Faster R-CNN was applied to detect sheep faces, and a
ResNet50V2 model with the ArcFace loss function was used to
classify them [23]. SheepFaceNet [24] and YOLOv4 [25] were
proposed to realize sheep face recognition, and researchers
have also worked on dog [26], [27] and giant panda [28], [29]
face recognition. Due to differences in facial features, it has
been difficult to apply the above methods directly to pig face
recognition.
The aforementioned studies indicate that it is necessary to
present a highly accurate recognition method for unconstrained
outdoor scenes, including variable environments and dirty pig
faces. We propose a pig face recognition method to address
these problems. With a wide forehead and narrow mouth
area, the pig face is trapezoidal. Hence, we extract features
based on trapezoidal pixel regions rather than pixel points.
We develop a trimmed mean attention mechanism (TMAM)
to assign weights for different channels, which helps the back-
bone network to achieve more accurate pig face classification.
In addition, it should be noted that this paper mainly considers
the common breeding scenario of only one pig in an enclosure
in the pig industry.
The main contributions of this article can be summarized
as follows.
1) A pig face recognition method based on trapezoid nor-
malized pixel difference (T-NPD) features and TMAM
is proposed to realize highly accurate pig face detection
and classification, which is practical when complex
environments such as dirty and unconstrained outdoor
conditions are considered. Particularly, it is able to
achieve pig face detection and recognition from different
angles.
2) A new image feature, T-NPD, is developed by analyzing
the biological characteristics of the pig face with a wide
forehead and narrow mouth, which is more suitable for
complex backgrounds due to its ability to avoid the
effects of dirty face and facial variations by extracting
features based on trapezoidal pixel regions. The exper-
iments results show that the proposed pig face detector
using T-NPD can achieve excellent performance in terms
of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1.
3) An attention mechanism, TMAM, is proposed, which
uses trimmed mean squeeze operation instead of global
average pooling (GAP) to eliminate the effect of edge
values on channel descriptors, thus assigning more accu-
rate weights to feature channels. Experimental results
show that 50-layer ResNet (ResNet50) with TMAM
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 72, 2023
(TMAM_ResNet50) can realize high-precision classifi-
cation of pig faces, and improve the overall accuracy by
2.13% compared to ResNet50. The proposed attention
mechanism has excellent portability and can help to
enhance the performance of common networks such as
ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, ResNet101 [30], and
ResNext50 [31].
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section II
reviews related work on CNNs and attention mechanisms.
In Section III, we present the proposed pig face recognition
method. Section IV presents experimental results and discus-
sion. Conclusions are drawn in Section V.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Many deep learning-based technologies have been proposed
for pig face recognition and other image classification tasks.
We briefly review these in the two main categories of CNNs
and the attention mechanism.
A. CNNs
Because a CNN can automatically learn features from the
input image without manual operators, it has tremendous
potential in image classification. The association of CNN
performance and network depth has been researched through
the design of the VGG [32]. GoogLeNet was developed to
boost the multiscale feature extraction ability of CNNs through
parallel convolution modes [33]. DenseNet [34] connects each
layer to each other layer in a feedforward manner. DLA [35]
ensures that the network has higher accuracy and fewer
parameters by combining layers in a tree structure. The study
of ResNet [30] showed that the problem of gradient vanishing
can be mitigated through a skip structure, and its bottle-
neck architecture improves the capability of the computation.
Consequently, networks such as Res2Net [36], ResNeXt [31],
and ResNeSt [37] have been proposed. Although many CNNs
have been proposed to improve performance from different
perspectives, the ResNet50 has obvious advantages. It has been
shown to require fewer training parameters in CNNs with the
same depth, and is less costly to train than networks with
similar residual structures [38]. More importantly, Resnet50
has shown high stability in image recognition tasks [9]. Hence
we use ResNet50 as the backbone network in this article.
B. Attention Mechanism
The attention mechanism is inspired by human perception,
by which a person concentrates on important features and
ignores others. The attention mechanism was first used in
natural language processing, and has shown great potential
when fused with CNNs for feature extraction and image
classification [39], [40], [41].
To this end, the design of attention mechanism has received
extensive attention. For instance, GENet [42] introduced a
spatial attention mechanism to focus on task-related regions,
which is suitable for object detection. SENet [16] used a
channel attention mechanism to perform GAP to squeeze
feature channels, whose weights were calculated with three
XU et al.: PIG FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON T-NPD FEATURE AND TMAM 3500713

Fig. 1. Framework of pig face recognition.

fully connected (FC) layers. A squeeze operation with GAP

only uses one special object feature to explore channel atten-
tion, which yields suboptimal channel descriptors. Therefore,
CBAM [43] used GAP and global max pooling simultaneously
for channel squeezing, which yielded a modest performance
gain. Some other attention mechanisms, such as CAM [44],
LAM [39], and SRM [45], also utilized GAP-based methods
to improve squeeze channels. Most methods used to optimize
the squeeze operation of GAP ignore the issue that the average
value it obtains is susceptible to channel edge values, whose
great deviation from other data seriously affect the represen-
tativeness of the obtained channel descriptor. To address this
problem, we developed a channel squeeze operation, TMAM,
adopting a trimmed mean, which can avoid the influence of
channel edge values in the traditional attention mechanism,
and is more effective than other attention mechanisms at the
pig face classification task.
III. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
We introduce the proposed pig face recognition method,
which includes detection and classification. For detection, the
T-NPD detector captures pig face images in unconstrained
outdoor conditions. For classification, TMAM_ResNet50 is
applied to classify the detected pig face images. Fig. 1 shows
the framework of the method.
A. T-NPD Detector for Pig Face Detection
While CNNs have been successfully applied to pig face
recognition [10], the acquisition of pig face images still
depends on manual work, which is time-consuming and cannot
meet the needs of large-scale farm automation. Therefore, it is
first necessary to detect the face.
The NPD detector [46] is fast and accurate, and is widely
used in human face detection. Fig. 2(a) shows its feature
extraction method between two pixel points. However, NPD
features are based on pixel points for feature extraction, which
Fig. 2. Feature extraction methods in (a) NPD method, features are
calculated from pixel x, y, and (b) T-NPD method, features are calculated
from trapezoidal pixel region xi , yi .
has two drawbacks when used for pig face detection. First,
feature extraction based on pixels point is susceptible to noise.
When applied to a dirty pig face, feature extraction becomes
difficult, which affects the accuracy of detection. Second, the
detection performance of the NPD detector depends on the
richness of pig face views in the training database, but it is
difficult to build a database with various pig face angles in
practice. The T-NPD feature is designed for feature extraction
with reference to the features of the pig face. Fig. 2(b) shows
the T-NPD feature extraction method between two trapezoidal
pixel regions in an image, which is formulated as
xi − x j
f (x i , x j ) = (1)
xi + x j
where i and j represent the i th and j th trapezoidal pixel
regions in the image, and x i and x j are their respective
intensity values. f (0, 0) is defined as 0 when x i = x j = 0.
For an image with width W and height H , x i and x j are
calculated as
x i = ri + ri+1 + ri+2 + ri+3 + ri+W +1 + ri+W +2 (2)
x j = r j + r j +1 + r j +2 + r j +3 + r j +W +1 + r j +W +2 (3)

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3500713
Fig. 3. Architecture of TMAM_ResNet50.
where ri and r j are the respective intensity values of pixels i
and j .
The T-NPD feature is designed based on the biometrics of
the pig face, comparing the values of two trapezoidal pixel
regions. Hence, T-NPD can better adapt to pig face feature
extraction and avoid the high requirements for pig face view
richness, which is more conducive to practical application.
Based on the extracted T-NPD features, a deep quadratic
tree (DQT) [46] is constructed to capture the interaction
between the dimensions and high-level information of features.
Subsequently, the Gentle AdaBoost algorithm [47] is applied
to train the T-NPD features based on DQT. To train more effec-
tively and eliminate negative samples earlier, a soft cascade
algorithm [48] is used to cascade the DQT and obtain a T-NPD
detector. In this way, a pig face can be accurately detected in
a timely manner in unconstrained outdoor conditions.
B. TMAM_ResNet50 for Pig Face Classification
We design TMAM_ResNet50 to achieve pig face recogni-
tion. TMAM_ResNet50 uses a ResNet50 backbone network
and automatically assigns weights to feature channels in
combination with TMAM, for more refined feature extraction.
Fig. 3 shows the TMAM_ResNet50 architecture.
1) Architecture: As shown in Fig. 3, TMAM_ResNet50
consists of a convolutional layer, a max pooling layer, four
kinds of blocks (Blocks 1–4), a GAP layer, and a full con-
nection layer. Block 1 includes three sequentially connected
identical structures, each composed of three convolution layers
and a TMAM. These are referred to as a residual block. Blocks
2–4 are, respectively, composed of four, six, and three identical
structures, each consisting of three convolution layers and a
TMAM. Table I describes each layer and its parameters.
2) TMAM: The TMAM attention mechanism models the
feature channel relationships and further improves classifica-
tion accuracy by automatically assigning precise weights to
feature channels. Fig. 4 shows the TMAM architecture, with
trimmed mean squeeze, excitation, and rescale steps.
a) Trimmed Mean Squeeze: In the traditional attention
mechanisms, such as CBAM [43], CAM [44], LAM [39],
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 72, 2023
Fig. 4. TMAM.
and SRM [45], the GAP-based methods are used to squeeze
channels. However, these methods ignore the problem that
the obtained average value is susceptible to the channel edge
values. The channel edge values usually have a large deviation
from other data, which will seriously affect the representative-
ness of the obtained channel descriptors. To solve this problem
and make better use of global spatial information, the trimmed
mean squeeze operation is adopted on feature map U =
{Uk ( p, q)|1 ≤ k ≤ c, 1 ≤ p ≤ h, 1 ≤ q ≤ w} to generate
channel descriptors, where c and k indicate the number and
sequence number, respectively, of feature channels, and p and
q are the sequence numbers of spatial dimensions h × w. The
steps of the trimmed mean squeeze operation are as follows.
A flattening operation is performed on Uk ( p, q) to obtain
channel flattening vector F = ( f1 , f2 , . . . , f λ , . . . , f h×w ),
where λ = 1, 2, . . . , h × w indicates the sequence number.
An efficient trimmed mean aggregation strategy is used,
where the edge value is first removed from F, and we
average the remaining channel flattening values. Under the
trimmed mean squeeze operation, R = {μk |1 ≤ k ≤ c} is
obtained by shrinking the spatial dimensions h × w of feature
map U , and the channel descriptor μk of the kth channel is
computed as
λ2
1
μk = sort(F) (4)
λ2 − λ1 λ
1
XU et al.: PIG FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON T-NPD FEATURE AND TMAM 3500713

TABLE I
PARAMETERS AND VALUES U SED IN THE TMAM_R ES N ET 50

where sort(·) denotes the sorting of values in descending TABLE II

order, and sort(F) is a sorting vector with sequence numbers S YSTEM S PECIFICATIONS
λ1 and λ2 .
We select values of λ1 and λ2 as (1/4) × h × w and
(3/4) × h × w, respectively. That is, the values of the first
and last quarter of the sorted vector are treated as edge values.
Through the trimmed mean squeeze, the multidimensional
feature map U on each feature channel is squeezed into a
number whose value is its descriptor.
b) Excitation: To fully utilize the channel descriptor
information gained by the trimmed mean squeeze operation,
the importance of different feature channels is modeled by
excitation, and weights are assigned to them. Excitation adopts
a gating mechanism consisting of two FC layers, which
can better model the complex relationships between feature represents the kth reinforced feature map after TMAM
channels by adding nonlinearity, while enabling more ade- Ok (u, v) = Sk Uk ( p, q) (6)
quate interaction between them. The adaptive recalibration
value S R 1×1×c indicates the importance of different feature where Sk is the weight assigned to the kth channel.
channels, which is obtained as With the rescale operation, feature channels can be given
weights according to their roles. Consequently, the feature map
S = σ (W2 δ(W1 R)) (5) U is enhanced due to the emphasis on important information
where δ is the ReLU activation function. δ is used after the and neglect of inferior information.
first FC layer to relieve gradient disappearance and improve
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
the convergence speed. σ is the sigmoid activation function,
which is used after the second FC layer to normalize the In this section, we discuss our experiments and evaluate
channel weight values between 0 and 1. W1  R c×(c/r) and their results on T-NPD, TMAM, and TMAM_ResNet50.
W2  R (c/r)×c represent the first and second FC layers, respec-
tively, and r is the reduction ratio of nodes between the two A. Implementation
FC layers. 1) Environment Settings: The PyTorch framework and Ana-
c) Rescale: The output of TMAM, O = {Ok (u, v)|1 ≤ conda development platform were employed to train and test
k ≤ c}, is obtained by rescaling the feature map U with adap- the pig face recognition method. System specifications are
tive recalibration values S = {Sk |1 ≤ k ≤ c}. Here, Ok (u, v) shown in Table II.

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2) Network Training: In the experimental part of this paper,

most networks were trained in the following way, i.e., the
Glorot uniform method was used to initialize the network, and
the batch size was set to 8 for training. Adam optimization was
applied to prevent local optima, with a learning rate of 0.0001.
The epoch of training was selected as 300. The error of the
model was quantified by the categorical cross-entropy
ω−1 
 d−1
L =− log( pn,d ) (7)
n=0 d=0

where ω and d are the numbers of images and categories,

respectively; and pn,d is the dth value of the network output
after softmax normalization. Fig. 5. (a) Training set. (b) Validation set.
3) Database Description: Negative and positive sample
databases were constructed to train the T-NPD detector. TABLE III
The negative sample database consisted of non-pig face R ESULTS OF P IG FACE D ETECTORS
images, including templates E of 20 × 20 pixels and T of
544 × 411 pixels. Template E was applied to train the
T-NPD detector. Template T was used to check the current
T-NPD detector, and could add a false detection image to
the negative sample database as new template E. Eventually,
a total of 1000 samples of template E and 200 samples of
template T were selected to establish the negative sample
database.
A positive sample database was built from pig face images verification. The process of image augmentation is illustrated
chosen from 30 publicly available videos of the JD pig face in Fig. 6.
dataset. Among these, 20 videos were randomly selected to
manually generate 500 pig face images to form the positive B. Evaluation of Proposed T-NPD Detector
sample database. To show the effectiveness of T-NPD fea- In the experiments, four indicators were used to evaluate
ture extraction, a test sample database was constructed with the T-NPD detector [50]
250 non-pig face images and 250 pig face images, and pig TP
Recall = (8)
face images were manually selected from the remaining ten TP + FN
videos. Training and validation sets were built to establish TP
TMAM_ResNet50, and obtained by using the T-NPD detector Precision = (9)
TP + FP
to filter pig faces from 20 videos from the pig face dataset. Recall · Precision
Considering that pig faces show diverse poses in practice, the F1 = 2 · (10)
Recall + Precision
number of images in the training set was designed to be less TP + TN
than in the verification set before data enhancement. Based on Accuracy = (11)
TP + FP + FN + TN
this, five face images were selected for each pig in the training
where TP and FN are the numbers of positive samples that are
set, and at least 10 for each pig in the validation set. In the
classified as pig face and non-pig face, respectively; FP and
end, the original training set was made up of 100 pig face
TN are the numbers of negative samples identified as pig face
images, and the validation set included 466 pig face images.
and non-pig face, respectively.
Fig. 5 shows an example of the settings of the original training
Meanwhile, the frames/s (FPS) was introduced as a metric
and verification sets of a pig.
to evaluate the detection time, which is formulated as [51]
4) Data Augmentation: To increase the number of images
in the training set is important to measure the performance FRA
FPS = (12)
of TMAM and TMAM_ResNet50, and it can prevent them T
from learning irrelevant features [49]. We applied 12 data where the T and FRA indicate the time and the number of
augmentation methods to increase the number and diversity of frames, respectively.
images in the original training set. These are mirror symmetry, The proposed T-NPD detector was compared with the
rotation by 10◦ , rotation by 20◦ , image sharpening, Gaussian traditional NPD detector [46] on the test sample database, and
blur, contrast increase, contrast reduction, brightness increase, five indicators are compared in Table III, which shows that
brightness reduction, random clipping, color increase, and although the proposed T-NPD detector had a high accuracy
color reduction. After augmentation, each pig had 65 images of 97.40% on the test sample database, and outperformed
for training, and more than 10 for verification. Ultimately, NPD detector on recall, precision and F1 metrics, the FPS
1300 pig face images were obtained for training, and 466 for of the proposed T-NPD detector was not significantly different

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XU et al.: PIG FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON T-NPD FEATURE AND TMAM 3500713

Fig. 6. Augmentation of pig face images.

Fig. 7. Detection results. (Top) T-NPD. (Bottom) NPD.

Fig. 8. Pig faces detected by T-NPD detector in unconstrained outdoor conditions. Green boxes represent detected pig faces.

from NPD detector. Consequently, it can be confirmed that the a visual comparison between T-NPD and NPD. It is obvious
proposed T-NPD detector is superior to the NPD detector, and that T-NPD correctly obtained the location of a pig face
has excellent practicability in pig face detection. Fig. 7 shows that was incorrectly detected by NPD. Fig. 8 displays more

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examples, further illustrating that T-NPD can effectively detect TABLE IV

pig faces from different angles in unconstrained outdoor C OMPARISONS OF A RCHITECTURES W ITH AND W ITHOUT TMAM
conditions.

C. Evaluation on Proposed TMAM

Two experiments were performed to evaluate the proposed
TMAM. First, the generalizability of TMAM was investigated
by incorporating it with commonly used backbone networks
to classify pig face images. Then TMAM was compared
with state-of-the-art attention mechanisms. In addition, the
grad-class activation map (Grad-CAM) was used to visual-
ize the enhancement of network feature extraction capability
by TMAM. In these experiments, the attention mechanism-
based method was trained on a training set, and classification
performance was evaluated on a verification set.
1) Incorporation of TMAM in Commonly Used Networks:
To investigate its generalizability, TMAM was incorporated
in the ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, ResNet101, and
ResNext50 networks, and we compared their pig face classifi-
cation performance with the original networks. We introduce
four classification performance metrics
αt
Overall accuracy = (13)
αt + α f
φ
1 
Mean recall = Recalll (14)
φ l=1
φ
1 
Mean precision = Precisionl (15)
φ l=1
φ
1  l
Mean F1 = F1 (16)
φ l=1
where φ is the number of pigs to be recognized; l refers
Fig. 9. Overall accuracy on validation set for different commonly used
to the lth pig; and αt and α f , respectively, are the numbers networks with and without TMAM.
of correctly and incorrectly classified pig face images in the
validation set. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the
training parameters of these models in this part are remained enhance classification performance. The above results indicate
consistent with those in Section IV-A, and the only difference that TMAM is generic, and it can efficiently improve the
is that the epochs here are chosen as 100, because we only performance of commonly used networks.
need to know whether TMAM is generic. 2) Comparison With Other Attention Mechanisms: We com-
Table IV shows classification results with and without pared some widely used attention mechanisms, such as
TMAM in commonly used networks. It can be observed that SENet [16], FCA [52], CBAM [43], and TMAM in the clas-
TMAM could enhance the classification performance of these sification of pig faces. ResNet50 was chosen as the backbone
networks on all indicators. Specifically, the improvements network for each attention mechanism. Params, FLOPs, mean
of overall accuracy, mean recall, mean precision, and mean AUC, and overall accuracy were used to evaluate the space
F1 of ResNet50 were 1.93%, 1.28%, 1.71%, and 1.50%, complexity, time complexity, generalization performance, and
respectively. Fig. 9 shows the overall accuracy curves of pig model accuracy, respectively. Specifically, the Params for
face classification for different networks, from which it can be evaluating the space complexity and the FLOPs for evaluating
seen that the overall accuracy of these networks was higher the time complexity are calculated as follows [18]:
after incorporating TMAM. Params = Co × (ke2 × Ci + 1) (17)
To further illustrate the effect of TMAM, Fig. 10 shows
FLOPs = Co × (ke2 × Ci + 1) × Hi × We (18)
the class activation maps of ten successfully classified pigs
by applying the Grad-CAM technique. It can be noticed that where Co represents the number of output channels, Ci rep-
ResNet50 with TMAM focuses more on learning features from resents the number of input channels, ke represents the size
the pig face than the background. This is why TMAM can of the convolution kernel, and Hi , We represent the height

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XU et al.: PIG FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON T-NPD FEATURE AND TMAM 3500713

Fig. 10. Class activation maps with and without the proposed attention mechanism for pig face images. (Top) Original pig face images. (Middle) Class
activation maps drawn by ResNet50. (Bottom) Class activation maps drawn by TMAM_ResNet50.

Fig. 11. Confusion matrix of incorporating different attention mechanisms into ResNet50 for pig face classification tasks. (a) ResNet50. (b) ResNet50+SE.
(c) ResNet50+CBAM (d) ResNet50+FCA. (e) ResNet50+TMAM.

and width of the output feature map. Furthermore, it is worth
noting that the training parameters of these models in this part
are remained consistent with those in Section IV-A.
As can be observed from Table V, although the Params
and FLOPs of TMAM are comparable to those of other
attention mechanisms, the mean AUC and overall accuracy
are better. This demonstrates that the original model equipped
with TMAM can have a better ability to achieve pig face
classification. Moreover, it should be noted that the experi-
mental results of Table V are obtained by training the model
several times and averaging these results. Fig. 11 shows the
confusion matrix of different methods, where the diagonal

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3500713
TABLE V
A CCURACIES AND PARAMETERS F ROM D IFFERENT
A RCHITECTURES AND ATTENTION M ECHANISMS
Fig. 12. Overall accuracy curves on validation set for different attention
mechanisms.
and non-diagonal values indicate the proportion of correct
and incorrect predictions, respectively. It is clear that the
diagonal response of TMAM outperforms the other attention
mechanisms, which means that it can improve classification
performance. Fig. 12 presents the overall accuracy curves of
pig face classification of various attention modules in different
epochs, which intuitively suggests that TMAM can be better
equipped with the backbone network than other attention
mechanisms. Based on the above results, it is concluded that
TMAM can better improve the performance of the backbone
network compared to other attention mechanisms with the
same Params and FLOPs.
D. Evaluation of Proposed TMAM_ResNet50
In the last experiment, to validate the proposed method of
pig face classification, TMAM_ResNet50 was compared with
six state-of-the-art classification algorithms: ResNet50 [30],
MobileNetV2 [53], MobileNetV3 [54], RegNet [55], Shuf-
fleNetV2 [56], and EfficientNetB0 [57]. The network training
parameters and performance metrics remained consistent with
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 72, 2023
TABLE VI
C LASSIFICATION R ESULTS OF D IFFERENT A RCHITECTURE
Fig. 13. Overall accuracy curves on validation set for different classification
methods.
those in Sections IV-A and IV-C, respectively. The classi-
fication results obtained by different algorithms are shown
in Table VI, from which it can be seen that the overall
accuracy, mean recall, mean precision, and mean F1 of
TMAM_ResNet50 reached 95.06%, 94.82%, 95.28%, and
95.05%, respectively, which were superior to other methods in
pig face classification tasks. In addition, it should be pointed
out that the experimental results of Table VI are also achieved
by training the model several times and averaging these
results.
Fig. 13 presents the overall accuracy curves for dif-
ferent epochs and classification algorithms, which were
usually higher for TMAM_RseNet50 than for other algo-
rithms. Fig. 14 displays some examples of recognition of
pig face images in unconstrained outdoor conditions by
combining T-NPD and TMAM_ResNet50, which demon-
strates the effectiveness of TMAM_ResNet50. Consequently,
it can be confirmed that TMAM_ResNet50 can realize pig
face classification in unconstrained outdoor conditions, and
XU et al.: PIG FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON T-NPD FEATURE AND TMAM
Fig. 14. Examples of pig face recognition in unconstrained outdoor conditions by combining T-NPD and TMAM_ResNet50. Green boxes represent detected
pig faces, class represents identity of pig, and prob represents confidence.
outperforms other methods on all classification performance
metrics.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this article, we proposed a method for pig face recog-
nition in unconstrained outdoor conditions. A detector using
the T-NPD feature was developed to obtain pig face regions
in an image. The TMAM attention mechanism was added to
ResNet50 to recognize the detected pig face. Experimental
results indicated that the T-NPD feature can better describe
the biological characteristics of a pig face and improve the
effectiveness of its detection. TMAM was shown to be generic
when applied in common networks and more effective than
other attention mechanisms. TMAM_ResNet50 also showed
excellent performance, with overall accuracy of 95.06% at the
pig face recognition task. In the future, we plan to improve
our method with model pruning, which could make it more
lightweight and available in practice. Moreover, we will also
carry out some new research directions, such as the recognition
of multiple pigs in one image, and the identification of pigs
of different ages.
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Shuiqing Xu (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D.
degree from the Department of Automation,
Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, in 2017.
Since 2017, he has been an Associate Profes-
sor with the College of Electrical Engineering and
Automation, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei,
China. His current research interests include image
processing, computer vision, and deep learning.
Qihang He received the B.E. degree from the
School of Electrical and Information Engineering,
Anhui University of Technology, Ma’anshan, China,
in 2020. He is currently pursuing the M.E. degree
with the College of Electrical Engineering and
Automation, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei,
China.
His research interests include machine learning
and deep learning.
Songbing Tao received the Ph.D. degree from the
Department of Automation, Chongqing University,
Chongqing, China, in 2020.
Since 2020, he has been a Post-Doctoral
Researcher with the College of Electrical Engineer-
ing and Automation, Hefei University of Technol-
ogy, Hefei, China. His research interests include
deep learning and pattern recognition.
XU et al.: PIG FACE RECOGNITION BASED ON T-NPD FEATURE AND TMAM
Hongtian Chen (Member, IEEE) received the B.S.
and M.S. degrees from the School of Electrical and
Automation Engineering, Nanjing Normal Univer-
sity, Nanjing, China, in 2012 and 2015, respectively,
and the Ph.D. degree from the College of Automa-
tion Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics
and Astronautics, Nanjing, in 2019.
He was a Visiting Scholar with the Institute for
Automatic Control and Complex Systems, Uni-
versity of Duisburg–Essen, Duisburg, Germany,
in 2018. He is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow with
the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, AB, Canada. His research interests include machine learning and
pattern recognition.
Dr. Chen was a recipient of the Grand Prize of Innovation Award of
Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic
of China in 2019, the Excellent Ph.D. Thesis Award of Jiangsu Province
in 2020, and the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Chinese
Association of Automation (CAA) in 2020. He currently serves as an
Associate Editor and a Guest Editor for a number of scholarly journals such as
IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON I NSTRUMENTATION AND M EASUREMENT, IEEE
T RANSACTIONS ON N EURAL N ETWORKS AND L EARNING S YSTEMS , and
IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON A RTIFICIAL I NTELLIGENCE.
Yi Chai received the Ph.D. degree from Chongqing
University, Chongqing, China, in 2001.
He is currently a Professor with the College of
Automation, Chongqing University. His research
interests include computer vision, artificial intelli-
gence, and machine learning.
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3500713
Weixing Zheng (Fellow, IEEE) received the B.Sc.
degree in applied mathematics and the M.Sc. and
Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from South-
east University, Nanjing, China, in 1982, 1984, and
1989, respectively.
Over the years, he has held various faculty/
research/visiting positions at Southeast University;
the Imperial College of Science, Technology and
Medicine, London, U.K.; The University of Western
Australia, Perth, WA, Australia; the Curtin Univer-
sity of Technology, Perth; the Munich University of
Technology, Munich, Germany; the University of Virginia, Charlottesville,
VA, USA; and the University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
He is currently a University Distinguished Professor with Western Sydney
University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Dr. Zheng has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE T RANSACTIONS
ON AUTOMATIC C ONTROL, IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON F UZZY S YSTEMS ,
IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON N EURAL N ETWORKS AND L EARNING S YSTEMS ,
IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON C YBERNETICS , IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON C ON -
TROL OF N ETWORK S YSTEMS , IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON C IRCUITS AND
S YSTEMS —I: R EGULAR PAPERS , and several other flagship journals. He has
been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Control Systems Society.