Engineering Commons^™

Multi-Pig Part Detection And Association With A Fully-Convolutional Network, Eric T. Psota, Mateusz Mittek, Lance C. Pérez, Ty Schmidt, Benny Mote

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Computer vision systems have the potential to provide automated, non-invasive monitoring of livestock animals, however, the lack of public datasets with well-defined targets and evaluation metrics presents a significant challenge for researchers. Consequently, existing solutions often focus on achieving task-specific objectives using relatively small, private datasets. This work introduces a new dataset and method for instance-level detection of multiple pigs in group-housed environments. The method uses a single fully-convolutional neural network to detect the location and orientation of each animal, where both body part locations and pairwise associations are represented in the image space. Accompanying this method is a new …