Mobile measuring system based on LabVIEW for pig body components estimation in a large-scale farm

Abstract

New equipment applications for the monitoring and measuring of pig growth play an important role in quality management and productivity improvement. One challenge that researchers face is how to obtain the body components of animals in large-scale farms automatically, which are significant to their growth, feed conversion, and disease occurrence. This study provided a mobile measuring system that could acquire the real-time data in large-scale farm to measure the body components of 200 pigs in 70, 100, and 130 days old respectively. The body components are: body length, body width, body height, hip width, and hip height. The programs of system were developed based on LabVIEW development platform, which consisted of three parts: control, calibration, and image processing. The calibration part was utilized to identify a distortion coefficient and calculate camera parameters. Backside images of pigs during growth were taken by using binocular cameras after calibration, and then processed to estimate pig body components. Experimental results showed that the mobile measuring system could be employed in large-scale pig farms and used to measure body components ranging from 23.1 to 116.2 cm. The estimated and manually measured body components suggested a good linear relationship with R2 > 0.82 and average deviation < 2.83%. These findings indicated that the proposed mobile measuring system could be utilized to observe pig growth and estimate body components. Therefore, the mobile measuring system offers the hardware and software for the non-contact and automatic measurement of pig growth data in large-scale farms.