Monitoring Motion of Pigs in Thermal Videos

We propose a new approach for monitoring animal movement in thermal videos. The method distinguishes movements as walking in the expected direction from walking in the opposite direction, stopping or lying down. The method utilizes blob detection combined with opti-cal ow to segment the pigs and extract features which characterize a pig’s movement (direction and speed).

Subsequently a multiway princi-pal component analysis is used to analyze the movement features and monitor their development over time. Results are presented in the form of quality control charts of the principal components. The method works on-line with pre-training.