An Edge-Deployable Method for Cow-Head Detection and Cross-Camera Association in Visible–Thermal Robotic Dairy Monitoring

Facial surface temperature provides useful non-contact information for monitoring dairy-cow health, welfare, heat stress, and reproductive status. Infrared thermography can capture thermal information from facial regions such as the eyes, muzzle, nostrils, and ears; however, infrared images often contain weak texture and indistinct anatomical boundaries, which can hinder reliable cow-head localization during mobile robotic inspection. Visible-light images provide richer structural information but do not contain temperature data. This study developed YOLO11-AFE, a lightweight visible–thermal cow-head detection and heterogeneous-camera association method for quadruped inspection robots. The detector incorporates ADown for lightweight downsampling, C3k2_FE for adaptive feature enhancement, and SPPF_ECA for channel-aware multi-scale representation. An improved Hungarian matching algorithm was subsequently used to establish one-to-one correspondences between cow-head detections in synchronized visible-light and infrared pseudo-colour images. Across three independent runs, YOLO11-AFE achieved precision, mAP@0.5, and mAP@0.5:0.95 values of 97.59 ± 0.20%, 96.37 ± 0.24%, and 70.76 ± 0.51%, respectively, on the visible-light test subset, and 96.11 ± 0.24%, 99.07 ± 0.10%, and 91.50 ± 0.40%, respectively, on the infrared subset. The model required 2.14 million parameters and 5.27 GFLOPs, representing reductions of 17.37% and 18.17%, respectively, relative to YOLO11n. The association method achieved an overall accuracy of 98.11% across 371 ground-truth cow-head pairs in the combined validation and test evaluation. TensorRT FP16 deployment on the Jetson Orin NX achieved 36.71 FPS for the complete core processing pipeline. These results demonstrate that YOLO11-AFE provides an accurate and computationally efficient perception front end for future non-contact facial-temperature monitoring using mobile inspection robots.