Automated monitoring of brush use in dairy cattle.

Autor: Sadrzadeh N; Animal Welfare Program, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada., Foris B; Animal Welfare Program, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada., Krahn J; Animal Welfare Program, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada., von Keyserlingk MAG; Animal Welfare Program, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada., Weary DM; Animal Welfare Program, Faculty of Land and Food Systems, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2024 Jun 25; Vol. 19 (6), pp. e0305671. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Jun 25 (Print Publication: 2024).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305671
Abstrakt: Access to brushes allows for natural scratching behaviors in cattle, especially in confined indoor settings. Cattle are motivated to use brushes, but brush use varies with multiple factors including social hierarchy and health. Brush use might serve an indicator of cow health or welfare, but practical application of these measures requires accurate and automated monitoring tools. This study describes a machine learning approach to monitor brush use by dairy cattle. We aimed to capture the daily brush use by integrating data on the rotation of a mechanical brush with data on cow identify derived from either 1) low-frequency radio frequency identification or 2) a computer vision system using fiducial markers. We found that the computer vision system outperformed the RFID system in accuracy, and that the machine learning algorithms enhanced the precision of the brush use estimates. This study presents the first description of a fiducial marker-based computer vision system for monitoring individual cattle behavior in a group setting; this approach could be applied to develop automated measures of other behaviors with the potential to better assess welfare and improve the care for farm animals.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Sadrzadeh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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