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Automatic counting and positioning of slaughter pigs within the pen using a convolutional neural network and video images

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift/Konferencebidrag i tidsskrift /Bidrag til avis › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › peer review

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Pen fouling is an undesired behaviour of slaughter pigs, which increases labour costs for the farmer, worsens the hygiene and welfare of the pigs, and has negative environmental consequences. Previous research suggests that monitoring the positioning behaviour of grower/finisher pigs within their pen has the potential to be used in early warning systems that can alert the farmer to an impending pen fouling event 1–3 days in advance. For such a warning system to be feasible, monitoring of the pigs’ positioning behaviour must be automated. To this end, we present a novel yet relatively simple method, namely a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a single linear regression output node. The proposed CNN takes partial images of a pen, corresponding to the different areas of the pen, and outputs an estimated count of the number of pigs in the partial image. By inputting three partial images corresponding to the three areas of the pen, the model can estimate the number of pigs in each area. The trained CNN generally performs well when applied to data from unseen test pens, with mean absolute errors of less than 1 pig and coefficients of determination between observed and estimated counts above 0.9. In cases where the trained model underperforms on the test pens, fine-tuning by transfer learning can be applied; we show that an initially underperforming model can be fine-tuned on one day's worth of test set data (26 labelled images), after which it will produce near-perfect estimates on all subsequent days in the same test set.

OriginalsprogEngelsk
Artikelnummer106296
TidsskriftComputers and Electronics in Agriculture
Vol/bind188
ISSN0168-1699
DOI
StatusUdgivet - sep. 2021

Bibliografisk note

Funding Information:
The work presented in this paper was funded by the Green Development and Demonstration Programme under the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Denmark (project IntactTails j. nr. 34009-13-0743), The Danish Council for Strategic Research (project PigIT, grant number 11-116191), and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme (project CYBELE, grant No. 825355). These funding bodies had no role in study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing the paper, nor in the decision to submit the article for publication. We further wish to thank our student worker, Sally Veronika Hansen, for her great effort in manually counting the pigs in the thousands of images of the five pens, and the anonymous stockmen at the experimental farm of the Institute of Animal Science, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Funding Information:
The work presented in this paper was funded by the Green Development and Demonstration Programme under the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Denmark (project IntactTails j. nr. 34009-13-0743), The Danish Council for Strategic Research (project PigIT, grant number 11-116191), and the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme (project CYBELE, grant No. 825355). These funding bodies had no role in study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing the paper, nor in the decision to submit the article for publication. We further wish to thank our student worker, Sally Veronika Hansen, for her great effort in manually counting the pigs in the thousands of images of the five pens, and the anonymous stockmen at the experimental farm of the Institute of Animal Science, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s)

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