Department of Data Analysis and Mathematical Modelling, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000, Gent, Belgium.
Animal Sciences Unit, ILVO, Scheldeweg 68, 9090, Melle, Belgium.
Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 29;13(1):14138. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-41104-6.
In recent years, computer vision has contributed significantly to the study of farm animal behavior. In complex environments such as commercial farms, however, the automated detection of social behavior and specific interactions between animals can be improved. The present study addresses the automated detection of agonistic interactions between caged animals in a complex environment, relying solely on computer vision. An automated pipeline including group-level temporal action segmentation, object detection, object tracking and rule-based action classification for the detection of agonistic interactions was developed and extensively validated at a level unique in the field. Comparing with observations made by human observers, our pipeline reaches 77% precision and 85% recall using a 5-min tolerance interval for the detection of agonistic interactions. Results obtained using this pipeline allow to construct time-dependent socio-matrices of a group of animals and derive metrics on the dominance hierarchy in a semi-automated manner. Group-housed breeding rabbits (does) with their litters in commercial farms are the main use-case in this work, but the idea is probably also applicable to other social farm animals.
近年来,计算机视觉在研究农场动物行为方面做出了重大贡献。然而,在商业农场等复杂环境中,动物之间的社会行为和特定互动的自动检测仍有待提高。本研究旨在仅依靠计算机视觉,自动检测复杂环境中笼养动物之间的攻击性行为。我们开发了一个自动化的流水线,包括群体级别的时间动作分割、目标检测、目标跟踪和基于规则的动作分类,用于检测攻击性行为,并在该领域中进行了广泛的验证。与人类观察者的观察结果相比,我们的流水线在检测攻击性行为时使用 5 分钟的容忍间隔,可达到 77%的精度和 85%的召回率。使用该流水线获得的结果允许以半自动方式构建一组动物的时间相关社会矩阵,并推导出关于优势等级的度量。本工作的主要应用案例是商业农场中群养繁殖兔(母兔)及其幼崽,但这个想法可能也适用于其他社交农场动物。
Front Vet Sci. 2024-6-4
J Neural Transm (Vienna). 2017-1
Poult Sci. 1988-7
Am J Primatol. 2015-12
Animals (Basel). 2024-8-15
Front Vet Sci. 2024-6-4
Nat Methods. 2022-4
Nat Methods. 2022-4
Animals (Basel). 2021-4-30
Nat Methods. 2020-2-3
J Anim Ecol. 2017-11-29
J Exp Anim Sci. 1991