Sow Farrowing Early Warning and Supervision for Embedded Board Implementations

Sow farrowing is an important part of pig breeding. The accurate and effective early warning of sow behaviors in farrowing helps breeders determine whether it is necessary to intervene with the farrowing process in a timely manner and is thus essential for increasing the survival rate of piglets and the profits of pig farms. For large pig farms, human resources and costs are important considerations in farrowing supervision. The existing method, which uses cloud computing-based deep learning to supervise sow farrowing, has a high equipment cost and requires uploading all data to a cloud data center, requiring a large network bandwidth. Thus, this paper proposes an approach for the early warning and supervision of farrowing behaviors based on the embedded artificial-intelligence computing platform (NVIDIA Jetson Nano). This lightweight deep learning method allows the rapid processing of sow farrowing video data at edge nodes, reducing the bandwidth requirement and ensuring data security in the network transmission. Experiments indicated that after the model was migrated to the Jetson Nano, its precision of sow postures and newborn piglets detection was 93.5%, with a recall rate of 92.2%, and the detection speed was increased by a factor larger than 8. The early warning of 18 approaching farrowing (5 h) sows were tested. The mean error of warning was 1.02 h.