Estimating body weight of pigs from posture analysis using a depth camera

A noninvasive method for estimating the body weight (BW) of a pig considering its posture using a low-cost depth camera (Kinect v2) was proposed. A total of 150 pigs were used, and 738 depth images (point clouds) were obtained for them. The pig "volume" was calculated from the pig point cloud, and it was found to have a very high correlation to BW. To evaluate the posture of a pig quantitatively, seven posture angles were calculated based on the "spine" extracted from a pig point cloud. We found the posture angles representing the height of the head position correlated with the accuracy of BW estimation using the "volume." Based on this finding, we proposed an "adjusted volume," which was adjusted based on the relationship between the posture angles and the estimation error. The BW of pigs was estimated using the simple regression model with the "adjusted volume," and the MAPE and RMSPE were 4.87% and 6.13%, respectively. The accuracy of the suggested model was similar to that of the volume-based estimation models of other studies that used only data with an appropriate pig posture for BW estimation.