Wutke Martin, Lensches Clara, Hartmann Ulrich, Traulsen Imke
Institute of Animal Breeding and Husbandry, Faculty of Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany.
Faculty of Agriculture, South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences, Soest, Germany.
PLoS One. 2024 Oct 2;19(10):e0310818. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310818. eCollection 2024.
Nowadays, video monitoring of farrowing and automatic video evaluation using Deep Learning have become increasingly important in farm animal science research and open up new possibilities for addressing specific research questions like the determination of husbandry relevant indicators. A robust detection performance of newborn piglets is essential for reliably monitoring the farrowing process and to access important information about the welfare status of the sow and piglets. Although object detection algorithms are increasingly being used in various scenarios in the field of livestock farming, their usability for detecting newborn piglets has so far been limited. Challenges such as frequent animal occlusions, high overlapping rates or strong heterogeneous animal postures increase the complexity and place new demands on the detection model. Typically, new data is manually annotated to improve model performance, but the annotation effort is expensive and time-consuming. To address this problem, we propose a Noisy Student approach to automatically generate annotation information and train an improved piglet detection model. By using a teacher-student model relationship we transform the image structure and generate pseudo-labels for the object classes piglet and tail. As a result, we improve the initial detection performance of the teacher model from 0.561, 0.838, 0.672 to 0.901, 0.944, 0.922 for the performance metrics Recall, Precision and F1-score, respectively. The results of this study can be used in two ways. Firstly, the results contribute directly to the improvement of piglet detection in the context of birth monitoring systems and the evaluation of the farrowing progress. Secondly, the approach presented can be transferred to other research questions and species, thereby reducing the problem of cost-intensive annotation processes and increase training efficiency. In addition, we provide a unique dataset for the detection and evaluation of newborn piglets and sow body parts to support researchers in the task of monitoring the farrowing process.
如今,在农场动物科学研究中,产仔的视频监控以及使用深度学习的自动视频评估变得越来越重要,并为解决诸如确定与饲养相关指标等特定研究问题开辟了新的可能性。新生仔猪的强大检测性能对于可靠地监测产仔过程以及获取有关母猪和仔猪福利状况的重要信息至关重要。尽管目标检测算法越来越多地应用于畜牧养殖领域的各种场景,但迄今为止,它们在检测新生仔猪方面的可用性有限。诸如频繁的动物遮挡、高重叠率或强烈的异构动物姿势等挑战增加了复杂性,并对检测模型提出了新的要求。通常,新数据需要人工标注以提高模型性能,但标注工作成本高昂且耗时。为了解决这个问题,我们提出了一种噪声学生方法来自动生成标注信息并训练改进的仔猪检测模型。通过使用师生模型关系,我们转换图像结构并为仔猪和尾巴等目标类别生成伪标签。结果,我们将教师模型的初始检测性能分别从召回率、精确率和F1分数的0.561、0.838、0.672提高到了0.901、0.944、0.922。本研究的结果可以有两种用途。首先,这些结果直接有助于在出生监测系统的背景下改进仔猪检测以及评估产仔进展。其次,所提出的方法可以转移到其他研究问题和物种上,从而减少成本高昂的标注过程问题并提高训练效率。此外,我们提供了一个用于检测和评估新生仔猪及母猪身体部位的独特数据集,以支持研究人员监测产仔过程的任务。