Computer vision and remote sensing to assess physiological responses of cattle to pre-slaughter stress, and its impact on beef quality: A review

Abstract

Pre-slaughter stress is well-known to affect meat quality of beef carcasses and methods have been developed to assess this stress. However, development of more practical and less invasive methods are required in order to assess the response of cattle to pre-slaughter stressors, which will potentially also assist with the prediction of beef quality. This review outlines the importance of pre-slaughter stress as well as existing and emerging technologies for quantification of the pre-slaughter stress. The review includes; i) indicators of meat quality and how they are affected by pre-slaughter stress in cattle, ii) contact techniques that have been commonly used to measure stress indicators in animals, iii) remotely sensed imagery techniques recently used as non-invasive methods to monitor physiological and behavioural parameters and iv) potential implementation of remotely sensed imagery data to perform contactless assessment of physiological measurements, which could be related to the pre-slaughter stress, as well as to the indicators of beef quality. Relevance to industry, conclusions and recommendations for research are included.

Keywords: Beef quality; Computer vision technology; Contactless monitoring; Physiological parameters; Pre-slaughter stress.