Automatic Behavior and Posture Detection of Sows in Loose Farrowing Pens Based on 2D-Video Images

The monitoring of farm animals and the automatic recognition of deviant behavior have recently become increasingly important in farm animal science research and in practical agriculture. The aim of this study was to develop an approach to automatically predict behavior and posture of sows by using a 2D image-based deep neural network (DNN) for the detection and localization of relevant sow and pen features, followed by a hierarchical conditional statement based on human expert knowledge for behavior/posture classification. The automatic detection of sow body parts and pen equipment was trained using an object detection algorithm (YOLO V3). The algorithm achieved an Average Precision (AP) of 0.97 (straw rack), 0.97 (head), 0.95 (feeding trough), 0.86 (jute bag), 0.78 (tail), 0.75 (legs) and 0.66 (teats). The conditional statement, which classifies and automatically generates a posture or behavior of the sow under consideration of context, temporal and geometric values of the detected features, classified 59.6% of the postures (lying lateral, lying ventral, standing, sitting) and behaviors (interaction with pen equipment) correctly. In conclusion, the results indicate the potential of DNN toward automatic behavior classification from 2D videos as potential basis for an automatic farrowing monitoring system