Single-stream long-term optical flow convolution network for action recognition of lameness dairy cow

•A deep learning-based method was proposed for the recognition cow lameness.•Single-stream optical flow convolution model can recognize cow lameness effectively.•The lameness behavior recognition accuracy of the proposed method was 98.24%.•The computational efficiency can achieve 564FPS and 1.77 ms/image.•This method was more stable in the antagonism of environmental robustness.