Abstract
Avoiding lameness or leg weakness in pig production is crucial to reduce cost, improve animal welfare and meat quality. Detection of lameness detection by the use of vision systems may assist the farmer or breeder to obtain a more accurate and robust measurement of lameness. The paper presents a low-cost vision system for measuring the locomotion of moving pigs based on motion detection, frame-grabbing and multivariate image analysis. The first step is to set up a video system based on web camera technology and choose a test area. Secondly, a motion detection and data storage system are used to build a processing system of video data. The video data are analyzed measuring the properties of each image, stacking them for each animal and then analyze these stacks using multivariate image analysis. The system was able to obtain and decompose information from these stacks, where components could be extracted, representing a particular motion pattern. These components could be used to classify or score animals according to this pattern, which might be an indicator of lameness. However, further improvement is needed with respect to standardization of herding, test area and tracking of animals in order to have a robust system to be used in a farm environment.
Highlights
Avoiding lameness or leg weakness in pig production is economically important, an animal welfare issue may have a positive effect on the carcass and meat quality.Leg weakness leads to the reduction of longevity of breeding pigs [1], and is caused by a number of factors, both environmental and genetical
Vision systems using video image analysis (VIA) could improve the accuracy of structural soundness by automating tedious tasks associated with these measurements [5]
The objectives of this study were 1) to develop and set up a vision system for evaluation of pig locomotion characterizing structural soundness of pigs by multivariate image analysis, 2) to present a simple application or prototype for classifying animals according to their gait or locomotion
Summary
Avoiding lameness or leg weakness in pig production is economically important, an animal welfare issue may have a positive effect on the carcass and meat quality.Leg weakness leads to the reduction of longevity of breeding pigs [1], and is caused by a number of factors, both environmental (floors, feeding etc.) and genetical. Lameness or structural soundness is traditionally measured in terms of subjective scoring of animal behaviour [3]. Vision systems using video image analysis (VIA) could improve the accuracy of structural soundness by automating tedious tasks associated with these measurements [5]. The estimated values for heritability of leg weakness sometimes vary from low values around 0.10 - 0.15 to mid-level 0.30 - 0.40, often with high standard errors [1,6]. This is often caused by the subjective nature of leg weakness measurements. Most of the costs are associated with the development of software and innovative systems
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