Segmentation of group-housed pigs using concave points and edge information

Monitoring behaviour of weaning pigs with weak immune systems is important to reduce huge losses in pig farms. Even though various researches have been reported for monitoring environment of pig farms, segmenting each pig from touching-pigs is still entrenched as a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a segmentation method for touching-pigs by using concave points and edge information in a video surveillance system. Especially, we interpret the segmentation problem as a time-series analysis problem in order to identify the concave points generated by touching-pigs. Based on the experimental results with the videos obtained from a domestic pig farm, we confirmed that the proposed method could accurately segment the touching-pigs.