Abstract:
The body condition scoring (BCS) is an important tool of assessment method on body condition for sow raising and management. It has been divided into 5 grades that from emaciated to overly fat grade and each grade had a score. The traditional method has negative effect on animals and farmers, and the process is complex with excessive contact. The body size and shape of sows are correlated with their reproductive performance but are difficult to measure manually. There is subjective uncertainty in the process of manual measurement. The Kinect's 3D reconstruction technology was used to estimate and analyze the buttock shape of sows. A total of 108 images of Large White sows were manually acquired by Kinect camera during the feeding process at Feng Ning Animal Experimental Building in Chengde, Hebei Province of China, from July 25, 2017 to August 15, 2017. The hip height and hip width were measured by using tape and the back fat thickness was measured by using back fat measuring instrument. The hip height, hip width and area of buttock were obtained by analyzing the key points of 48 images. In order to obtain the measurement points of the livestock, several processing steps were taken, and the steps were as follow: 1) The sow stall was removed manually by Geomagic, and the target pig was acquired. In order to improve post-processing speed, the vertex culling algorithm was used to simplify the Three-dimensional model. 2) Since the models acquired were from different angles, the principal component analysis (PCA) was used to acquire new coordinate system. By using the geometrical relationship among the coordinate axes, standard measuring coordinate system was defined in this paper. 3) According to the geometric feature of the measurement points, the hip height, hip width and area of buttock were obtained. The results showed that the root mean square error of estimated body size was less than 2.1 cm, which meet the requirements of precision. The slice method was used to draw a curve at the highest point of the area of buttock based on the point cloud data. The least square fitting method was used to get the curve of hip contour. The hip radius of curvature was calculated by derivation formula. The results showed that the height-width ratio, area and radius of curvature of the sow's hip had the correlation with the back fat thickness. The correlation coefficients were 0.567, 0.502 and 0.951 respectively. With radius of curvature as the main parameter, the sow body condition estimation model was built based on the experience of hip morphology. 60 images were selected for validation. By comparing the measured and the estimated values of back fat thickness, the maximum absolute error of back fat detection is 1.3 mm and the average relative error is 3.7%. The accuracy of body condition assessment was 91.7% compared with the traditional methods. All the results mentioned above indicate that this study provides a non-contact body condition assessment method based on 3D reconstruction technology and has certain application potential in the real livestock productive.