Automatic identification and analysis of multi-object cattle rumination based on computer vision

Rumination in cattle is closely related to their health, which makes the automatic monitoring of rumination an important part of smart pasture operations. However, manual monitoring of cattle rumination is laborious and wearable sensors are often harmful to animals. Thus, we propose a computer vision-based method to automatically identify multi-object cattle rumination, and to calculate the rumination time and number of chews for each cow. The heads of the cattle in the video were initially tracked with a multi-object tracking algorithm, which combined the You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm with the kernelized correlation filter (KCF). Images of the head of each cow were saved at a fixed size, and numbered. Then, a rumination recognition algorithm was constructed with parameters obtained using the frame difference method, and rumination time and number of chews were calculated. The rumination recognition algorithm was used to analyze the head image of each cow to automatically detect multi-object cattle rumination. To verify the feasibility of this method, the algorithm was tested on multi-object cattle rumination videos, and the results were compared with the results produced by human observation. The experimental results showed that the average error in rumination time was 5.902% and the average error in the number of chews was 8.126%. The rumination identification and calculation of rumination information only need to be performed by computers automatically with no manual intervention. It could provide a new contactless rumination identification method for multi-cattle, which provided technical support for smart pasture.