Horses and breeders need to be safe on the farm and the riding club. On account of the great value of the horse, the breeder needs to protect it from theft and disease. In this context, it is important to detect and to recognize the identity of each horse for security reasons. In fact, this paper proposes a Smart Riding Club Biometric System (SRCBS) consisting in automatically detecting and recognizing horses as well as humans. The proposed system is based on the facial biometrics for a horse and the gait biometrics for a human due to their simplicity and intuitiveness in an uncontrolled environment. The present work focuses mainly on horse face detection and recognition. Animal face detection is still extremely difficult given the fact that face textures and shapes are grossly diverse. In addition, recent detectors require a huge dataset for training and represent a huge number of parameters and layers, leading to so much training time. For resolving these problems and also for a useful detection system, this paper proposes a Sparse Neural Network (SNN) based on sparse features for horse face detection. Different global and local features were performed to identify horses and humans for the recognition process. Due to the unavailability of horse databases, this paper presents a new benchmark for horse detection and recognition in order to evaluate our proposed system. This system achieved an average precision equal to 90% for horse face detection and a recognition rate equal to 99.89% for horse face identification.

This paper focuses on the face detection problem of three popular animal cat-egories that need control such as horses, cats and dogs. To be precise, a new Convolutional Neural Network for Animal Face Detection (CNNAFD) is actu-ally investigated using processed filters based on gradient features and applied with a new way. A new convolutional layer is proposed through a sparse feature selection method known as Automated Negotiation-based Online Feature Selection (ANOFS). CNNAFD ends by stacked fully connected layers which represent a strong classifier. The fusion of CNNAFD and MobileNetV2 constructs the newnetwork CNNAFD-MobileNetV2 which improves the classification results and gives better detection decisions. Our work also introduces a new Tunisian Horse Detection Database (THDD). The proposed detector with the new CNNAFD-MobileNetV2 network achieved an average precision equal to 99.78%, 99% and 98.28% for cats, dogs and horses respectively.