%0 Journal Article
%T PRELIMINARY STUDY FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OFAN IMAGE ANALYSIS ALGORITHM TO DETECT DAIRY COW PRESENCE AT THE FEED BARRIER
%A Simona M.C. Porto
%A Claudia Arcidiacono
%A Giuseppe C. Guarnera
%A Giovanni Cascone
%J Journal of Agricultural Engineering
%D 2011
%I PAGEPress Publications
%R 10.4081/jae.2011.4.17
%X The objective of this study was to investigate the applicability of the Viola-Jones algorithm for continuous detection of the feeding behaviour of dairy cows housed in an open free-stall barn. A methodology was proposed in order to train, test and validate the classifier. A lower number of positive and negative images than those used by Viola and Jones were required during the training. The testing produced the following results: hit rate of about 97.85%, missed rate of about 2.15%, and false positive rate of about 0.67%. The validation was carried out by an accuracy assessment procedure which required the time-consuming work of an operator who labelled the true position of the cows within the barn and their behaviours. The accuracy assessment revealed that among the 715 frames about 90.63% contained only true positives, whereas about 9.37% were affected by underestimation, i.e., contained also one or two false negatives. False positives occurred only in 2.93% of the analyzed frames. Though a moderate mismatch between the testing and the validation performances was registered, the results obtained revealed the adequacy of the Viola-Jones algorithm for detecting the feeding behaviour of dairy cows housed in open free-stall barns. This, in turn, opens up opportunities for an automatic analysis of cow behaviour.
%K precision livestock farming
%K dairy farming
%K vision techniques
%K animal detection.
%U http://www.agroengineering.org/jae/article/view/22