Lee J, Jin L, Park D, Chung Y. Automatic Recognition of Aggressive Behavior in Pigs Using a Kinect Depth Sensor.
SENSORS 2016;
16:s16050631. [PMID:
27144572 PMCID:
PMC4883322 DOI:
10.3390/s16050631]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 49] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/03/2016] [Revised: 04/27/2016] [Accepted: 04/28/2016] [Indexed: 12/18/2022]
Abstract
Aggression among pigs adversely affects economic returns and animal welfare in intensive pigsties. In this study, we developed a non-invasive, inexpensive, automatic monitoring prototype system that uses a Kinect depth sensor to recognize aggressive behavior in a commercial pigpen. The method begins by extracting activity features from the Kinect depth information obtained in a pigsty. The detection and classification module, which employs two binary-classifier support vector machines in a hierarchical manner, detects aggressive activity, and classifies it into aggressive sub-types such as head-to-head (or body) knocking and chasing. Our experimental results showed that this method is effective for detecting aggressive pig behaviors in terms of both cost-effectiveness (using a low-cost Kinect depth sensor) and accuracy (detection and classification accuracies over 95.7% and 90.2%, respectively), either as a standalone solution or to complement existing methods.
Collapse