A Cost-Effective Pigsty Monitoring System Based on a Video Sensor

Automated activity monitoring has become important in many applications. In particular, automated monitoring is an important issue in large-scale management of group-housed livestock because it can save a significant part of farm workers’ time or minimize the damage caused by livestock problems. In this paper, we propose an automated solution for measuring the daily-life activities of pigs by using video data in order to manage the group-housed pigs. Especially, we focus on the circadian rhythm of group-housed pigs under windowless and 24-hour light-on conditions. Also, we derive a cost-effective solution within the acceptable range of quality for the activity monitoring application. From the experimental results with the video monitoring data obtained from two pig farms, we believe our method based on circadian rhythm can be applied for detecting management problems of group-housed pigs in a cost-effective way.