Automated recognition of postures and drinking behaviour for the detection of compromised health in pigs

The Dataset.zip file comprises of three folders as the following:

1) Animal trial
This folder includes the full image dataset (with .mp4 format) of the food restriction trial. Fifteen pigs were housed, under commercial conditions, in a single, fully-slatted pen from 9 to 14 weeks of age. Food and water were provided to the pens using 4 drinking sources and 4 feeding troughs respectively. Pigs were fed ad-libitum a commercial food appropriate for their stage of growth. Food that remained in the feeding troughs was removed, weighed and replaced, with a predefined amount of new food at approximately 09:30 of every morning. The ad-libitum protocol applied for 4 days. Subsequently, pigs were quantitatively food-restricted with the pen receiving 80% of their daily ad-libitum feed for 4 consecutive days at 12 weeks of age. Food allocation at 12 weeks of age consisted of ad-libitum daily intake: 0.059–0.070 kg feed/kg initial total pen body weight; restriction daily intake: 0.047 kg feed/kg initial total pen body weight. Immediately following the 4 days of food restriction, pigs were returned to ad-libitum feeding. No adverse effects were recorded at any point during the food restriction protocol. After completion of the study, all the pigs were checked by a veterinarian and released back into the commercial stock.

2) Annotation for postures and drinking

Sample frames were selected from our database of video sequences to construct a data set for training and testing. Our behavioural dataset comprised a total of 7,35,094 instances (an instance denotes an individual pig label with its bounding box coordinates in a given image; this is provided with .mat format) across 1,13,379 images (with .jpg format); each pig within an image was manually annotated into one of five categories. By definition, the bounding box specifies the location of a pig within an image. It contains a vector in the format [x y width height], where x and y correspond to the upper left corner of the bounding box while the width and height denote width and height of the rectangular-shaped box around each pig.

3) Code of the detection method

The code used to detect pig postures and drinking behaviour.