Detection and tracking of pigs in natural environments based on video analysis

Detection and tracking of pigs are important for analyzing pig behavior using computer vision. However, in natural environments, illumination changes, complex scenes, adhesion, occlusion, and individual identification from multiple objects are challenges for detection and tracking. This paper provided an anti-interference algorithm for pig detection and tracking based on video analysis. Firstly, pigs were recognized in natural environment based on color information, and noises were removed based on the analysis of connected regions in the binary images. Secondly, multiple pigs were separated by contours and edges. Thirdly, pigs were tracked based on a set of association rules with constraint items (DT-ACR). When DT-ACR fails, targets that are not lost were tracked continuously, while lost targets were retrieved in the nearby location, which effectively increased the duration of tracking. Experiments showed that the algorithm was able to track each individual pig in the following conditions: no-light scenes, sun glint scenes, adhesion scenes and occlusion scenes. The overall tracking accuracy reached up to 87.32% (83.85% for serious adhesion, 87.4% for occlusion, 82.4% for strong light, 82.17% for no light and dark, 96.58% for 2 pigs, 88.33% for 3 pigs and 77.63 for 4 pigs). A pig activity analysis study based on the pig detection and tracking algorithm was carried out, and the results showed that the proposed method was able to track pigs for a long period of time and extract the values that reflected pigs’ movements.