The precision livestock farming(PLF)has the objective to maximize each animal's performance while reducing the environmental impact and maintaining the quality and safety of meat production.Among the PLF technique...The precision livestock farming(PLF)has the objective to maximize each animal's performance while reducing the environmental impact and maintaining the quality and safety of meat production.Among the PLF techniques,the personalised management of each individual animal based on sensors systems,represents a viable option.It is worth noting that the implementation of an effective PLF approach can be still expensive,especially for small and medium-sized farms;for this reason,to guarantee the sustainability of a customized livestock management system and encourage its use,plug and play and cost-effective systems are needed.Within this context,we present a novel low-cost method for identifying beef cattle and recognizing their basic activities by a single surveillance camera.By leveraging the current state-of-the-art methods for real-time object detection,(i.e.,YOLOv3)cattle's face areas,we propose a novel mechanism able to detect the ear tag as well as the water ingestion state when the cattle is close to the drinker.The cow IDs are read by an Optical Character Recognition(OCR)algorithm for which,an ad hoc error correction algorithm is here presented to avoid numbers misreading and correctly match the IDs to only actually present IDs.Thanks to the detection of the tag position,the OCR algorithm can be applied only to a specific region of interest reducing the computational cost and the time needed.Activity times for the areas are outputted as cattle activity recognition results.Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method,showing a mAP@0.50 of 89%.展开更多
基金LOWeMEAT(LOW Emission MEAT),thanks to the decisive contribution from the Regional Rural Development Programmes(PSR),which are co-financed by the European fund for rural devel development(FEASR)-Bando Regione Veneto PSR 2014-2020 DGR 1203/2016misura16.1.
文摘The precision livestock farming(PLF)has the objective to maximize each animal's performance while reducing the environmental impact and maintaining the quality and safety of meat production.Among the PLF techniques,the personalised management of each individual animal based on sensors systems,represents a viable option.It is worth noting that the implementation of an effective PLF approach can be still expensive,especially for small and medium-sized farms;for this reason,to guarantee the sustainability of a customized livestock management system and encourage its use,plug and play and cost-effective systems are needed.Within this context,we present a novel low-cost method for identifying beef cattle and recognizing their basic activities by a single surveillance camera.By leveraging the current state-of-the-art methods for real-time object detection,(i.e.,YOLOv3)cattle's face areas,we propose a novel mechanism able to detect the ear tag as well as the water ingestion state when the cattle is close to the drinker.The cow IDs are read by an Optical Character Recognition(OCR)algorithm for which,an ad hoc error correction algorithm is here presented to avoid numbers misreading and correctly match the IDs to only actually present IDs.Thanks to the detection of the tag position,the OCR algorithm can be applied only to a specific region of interest reducing the computational cost and the time needed.Activity times for the areas are outputted as cattle activity recognition results.Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method,showing a mAP@0.50 of 89%.