Statistical interaction modeling of bovine herd behaviors

While there has been interest in modeling the group behavior of herds or flocks, much of this work has focused on simulating their collective spatial motion patterns which have not accounted for individuality in the herd and instead assume a homogenized role for all members or sub-groups of the herd. Animal behavior experts have noted that domestic animals exhibit behaviors that are indicative of social hierarchy: leader/follower type behaviors are present as well as dominance and subordination, aggression and rank order, and specific social affiliations may also exist. Both wild and domestic cattle are social species, and group behaviors are likely to be influenced by the expression of specific social interactions. In this paper, Global Positioning System coordinate fixes gathered from a herd of beef cows tracked in open fields over several days at a time are utilized to learn a model that focuses on the interactions within the herd as well as its overall movement. Using these data in this way explores the validity of existing group behavior models against actual herding behaviors. Domain knowledge, location geography and human observations, are utilized to explain the causes of these deviations from this idealized behavior

Lidar-based Gait Analysis and Activity Recognition in a 4D Surveillance System

This paper presents new approaches for gait and activity analysis based on data streams of a Rotating Multi Beam (RMB) Lidar sensor. The proposed algorithms are embedded into an integrated 4D vision and visualization system, which is able to analyze and interactively display real scenarios in natural outdoor environments with walking pedestrians. The main focus of the investigations are gait based person re-identification during tracking, and recognition of specific activity patterns such as bending, waving, making phone calls and checking the time looking at wristwatches. The descriptors for training and recognition are observed and extracted from realistic outdoor surveillance scenarios, where multiple pedestrians are walking in the field of interest following possibly intersecting trajectories, thus the observations might often be affected by occlusions or background noise. Since there is no public database available for such scenarios, we created and published a new Lidar-based outdoors gait and activity dataset on our website, that contains point cloud sequences of 28 different persons extracted and aggregated from 35 minutes-long measurements. The presented results confirm that both efficient gait-based identification and activity recognition is achievable in the sparse point clouds of a single RMB Lidar sensor. After extracting the people trajectories, we synthesized a free-viewpoint video, where moving avatar models follow the trajectories of the observed pedestrians in real time, ensuring that the leg movements of the animated avatars are synchronized with the real gait cycles observed in the Lidar stream