Instance Segmentation with Mask R-CNN Applied to Loose-Housed Dairy Cows in a Multi-Camera Setting

With increasing herd sizes came an enhanced requirement for automated systems to support the farmers in the monitoring of the health and welfare status of their livestock. Cattle are a highly sociable species, and the herd structure has important impact on the animal welfare. As the behaviour of the animals and their social interactions can be influenced by the presence of a human observer, a camera based system that automatically detects the animals would be beneficial to analyse dairy cattle herd activity. In the present study, eight surveillance cameras were mounted above the barn area of a group of thirty-six lactating Holstein Friesian dairy cows at the Chamber of Agriculture in Futterkamp in Northern Germany. With Mask R-CNN, a state-of-the-art model of convolutional neural networks was trained to determine pixel level segmentation masks for the cows in the video material. The model was pre-trained on the Microsoft common objects in the context data set, and transfer learning was carried out on annotated image material from the recordings as training data set. In addition, the relationship between the size of the used training data set and the performance on the model after transfer learning was analysed. The trained model achieved averaged precision (Intersection over union, IOU = 0.5) 91% and 85% for the detection of bounding boxes and segmentation masks of the cows, respectively, thereby laying a solid technical basis for an automated analysis of herd activity and the use of resources in loose-housing

Beef Cattle Instance Segmentation Using Mask R-Convolutional Neural Network

Maintaining the cattle farm along with the wellbeing of every heifer has been the major concern in dairy farm. A robust system is required which can tackle the problem of continuous monitoring of cows. the computer vision techniques provide a new way to understand the challenges related to the identification and welfare of the cows. This paper presents a state-of-art instance segmentation mask RCNN algorithm to train and build a model on a very challenging cow dataset that is captured during the winter season. The dataset poses many challenges such as overlapping of cows, partial occlusion, similarity between cows and background, and bad lightening. An attempt is made to improve the accuracy of the segmenter and the performance is measured after fine tuning the baseline model. The experiment result shows that fine tuning the mask RCNN algorithm helps in significantly improving the accuracy of instance segmentation of cows. this work is a contribution towards the real time monitoring of cows in cattle farm environment with the purpose of behavioural analysis of the cattle

Application of Machine Learning Identification and Classification of Muturu and Keteku Cattle Species for a Smart Agricultural Practice in Developing Countries such as Nigeria

Smart technologies have drastically reshaped the traditional methods of practicing agriculture as witnessed in husbandry. In this paper, a novel application of machine learning identification and classification of Muturu and Keteku cattle species in Nigeria was proposed as the mainstream model that enables the precision and intelligence perception of animal husbandry for a smart agricultural practice using enhanced mask region-based convolutional neural networks (mask R-CNN). A performance accuracy of 0.92 mAP (mean Average Precision) was achieved by the enhanced mask R-CNN model, making it on a par with the existing models

Lypsylehmien tunnistaminen ja seuranta konenäön avulla

Improving the monitoring of health and well-being of dairy cows through the use of computer vision based systems is a topic of ongoing research. A reliable and low-cost method for identifying cow individuals would enable automatic detection of stress, sickness or injury, and the daily observation of the animals would be made easier. Neural networks have been used successfully in the identification of cow individuals, but methods are needed that do not require incessant annotation work to generate training datasets when there are changes within a group. Methods for person re-identification and tracking have been researched extensively, with the aim of generalizing beyond the training set. These methods have been found suitable also for re-identifying and tracking previously unseen dairy cows in video frames. In this thesis, a metric-learning based re-identification model pre-trained on an existing cow dataset is compared to a similar model that has been trained on new video data recorded at Luke Maaninka research farm in Spring 2021, which contains 24 individually labelled cow individuals. The models are evaluated in tracking context as appearance descriptors in Kalman filter based tracking algorithm. The test data is video footage from a separate enclosure in Maaninka and a group of 24 previously unseen cow individuals. In addition, a simple procedure is proposed for the automatic labeling of cow identities in images based on RFID data collected from cow ear tags and feeding stations, and the known feeding station locations

Advances in Sensors, Big Data and Machine Learning in Intelligent Animal Farming

Animal production (e.g., milk, meat, and eggs) provides valuable protein production for human beings and animals. However, animal production is facing several challenges worldwide such as environmental impacts and animal welfare/health concerns. In animal farming operations, accurate and efficient monitoring of animal information and behavior can help analyze the health and welfare status of animals and identify sick or abnormal individuals at an early stage to reduce economic losses and protect animal welfare. In recent years, there has been growing interest in animal welfare. At present, sensors, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are used to improve management efficiency, reduce production costs, and enhance animal welfare. Although these technologies still have challenges and limitations, the application and exploration of these technologies in animal farms will greatly promote the intelligent management of farms. Therefore, this Special Issue will collect original papers with novel contributions based on technologies such as sensors, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to study animal behavior monitoring and recognition, environmental monitoring, health evaluation, etc., to promote intelligent and accurate animal farm management