Determining the growth of pigs in commercial facilities using machine vision: on-farm and offline results

A vision system was developed to determine the live weight of pigs from their body measurements non-invasively. This article presents on-farm and offline results obtained from the piGUI system while estimating the weight of grower pigs. During the on-farm trial the system recorded the growth of four successive batches of grower pigs at a commercial piggery. The growth output from the system was used to demonstrate the system’s potential in detecting the effect of undesirable conditions in practice. As according to the system, extreme summer temperatures may have been responsible for a decrease in the animal’s activity and growth. Offline results indicated that the group average weights of the grower pigs could be estimated within 1.3 kg error and group weight deviations within 1.2 kg error. More than 65% of all the estimates of individual pigs were within 2 kg of their actual weight, while estimates greater than 5 kg error were restricted to less than 5% of all estimates