Automatic detection of ruminant cows’ mouth area during rumination based on machine vision and video analysis technology

In order to realize the automatic monitoring of ruminant activities of cows, an automatic detection method for the mouth area of ruminant cows based on machine vision technology was studied. Optical flow was used to calculate the relative motion speed of each pixel in the video frame images. The candidate mouth region with large motion ranges was extracted, and a series of processing methods, such as grayscale processing, threshold segmentation, pixel point expansion and adjacent region merging, were carried out to extract the real area of cows’ mouth. To verify the accuracy of the proposed method, six videos with a total length of 96 min were selected for this research. The results showed that the highest accuracy was 87.80%, the average accuracy was 76.46% and the average running time of the algorithm was 6.39 s. All the results showed that this method can be used to detect the mouth area automatically, which lays the foundation for automatic monitoring of cows’ ruminant behavior.