Cattle-CLIP: A Multimodal Framework for Cattle Behaviour Recognition from Video

Robust behaviour recognition in real-world farm environments remains challenging due to several data-related limitations, including the scarcity of well-annotated livestock video datasets and the substantial domain gap between large-scale pre-training corpora and agricultural surveillance footage. To address these challenges, we propose Cattle-CLIP, a domain-adaptive vision-language framework that reformulates cattle behaviour recognition as cross-modal semantic alignment rather than purely visual classification. Instead of directly fine-tuning visual backbones, Cattle-CLIP incorporates a temporal integration module to extend image-level contrastive pre-training to video-based behaviour understanding, enabling consistent semantic alignment across time. To mitigate the distribution shift between web-scale image-text data used for the pre-trained model and real-world cattle surveillance footage, we further introduce tailored augmentation strategies and specialised behaviour prompts. Furthermore, we construct CattleBehaviours6, a curated and behaviour-consistent video dataset comprising 1905 annotated clips across six indoor behaviours to support model training and evaluation. Beyond serving as a benchmark for our proposed method, the dataset provides a standardised ethogram definition, offering a practical resource for future research in livestock behaviour analysis. Cattle-CLIP is evaluated under both fully-supervised and few-shot learning scenarios, with a particular focus on data-scarce behaviour recognition, an important yet under-explored goal in livestock monitoring. Experiments show that Cattle-CLIP achieves 96.1% overall accuracy across six behaviours in supervised settings, with near-perfect recall for feeding, drinking and standing-ruminating behaviours, and demonstrates robust generalisation with limited data in few-shot scenarios.