Pig husbandry constitutes a significant segment within the broader framework of livestock farming, with porcine well-being emerging as a paramount concern due to its direct implications on pig breeding and production. An easily observable proxy for assessing the health of pigs lies in their daily patterns of movement. The daily movement patterns of pigs can be used as an indicator of their health, in which more active pigs are usually healthier than those who are not active, providing farmers with knowledge of identifying pigs’ health state before they become sick or their condition becomes life-threatening. However, the conventional means of estimating pig mobility largely rely on manual observations by farmers, which is impractical in the context of contemporary centralized and extensive pig farming operations. In response to these challenges, multi-object tracking and pig behavior methods are adopted to monitor pig health and welfare closely. Regrettably, these existing methods frequently fall short of providing precise and quantified measurements of movement distance, thereby yielding a rudimentary metric for assessing pig health. This paper proposes a novel approach that integrates optical flow and a multi-object tracking algorithm to more accurately gauge pig movement based on both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the shortcomings of solely relying on tracking algorithms. The optical flow records accurate movement between two consecutive frames and the multi-object tracking algorithm offers individual tracks for each pig. By combining optical flow and the tracking algorithm, our approach can accurately estimate each pig’s movement. Moreover, the incorporation of optical flow affords the capacity to discern partial movements, such as instances where only the pig’s head is in motion while the remainder of its body remains stationary. The experimental results show that the proposed method has superiority over the method of solely using tracking results, i.e., bounding boxes. The reason is that the movement calculated based on bounding boxes is easily affected by the size fluctuation while the optical flow data can avoid these drawbacks and even provide more fine-grained motion information. The virtues inherent in the proposed method culminate in the provision of more accurate and comprehensive information, thus enhancing the efficacy of decision-making and management processes within the realm of pig farming.

Shrimp farming has traditionally served as a crucial source of seafood and revenue for coastal countries. However, with the rapid development of society, conventional small-scale manual shrimp farming can no longer meet the increasing demand for rapid growth. As a result, it is imperative to continuously develop automation technology for efficient large-scale shrimp farming. Smart shrimp farming represents an innovative application of advanced technologies and management practices in shrimp aquaculture to expand the scale of production. Nonetheless, the use of these new technologies is not without difficulties, including the scarcity of public datasets and the high cost of labeling. In this paper, we focus on the application of advanced computer vision techniques to shrimp farming. To achieve this objective, we first establish a high-quality shrimp dataset for training various deep learning models. Subsequently, we propose a method that combines unsupervised learning with downstream instance segmentation tasks to mitigate reliance on large training datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that the method involving contrastive learning outperforms the direct fine-tuning of an instance segmentation model for shrimp in instance segmentation tasks. Furthermore, the concepts presented in this paper can extend to other fields that utilize computer vision technologies.

Identifying individual pigs is crucial for efficient breeding, health management, and disease control in modern farming. Traditional animal face identification methods are labor-intensive and prone to inaccuracies, while existing CNN-based pig face recognition models often struggle with high computational demands, large sizes, and reliance on extensive labeled data, which limit their practical application. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel, decoupled approach to pig face recognition that separates detection from identification. This strategy employs a detection model as a pre-processing step, significantly reducing the need for extensive re-annotation for new datasets. Additionally, the paper introduces a method that integrates offline knowledge distillation with a lightweight pig face recognition model, aiming to build an efficient and embedding-friendly system. To achieve these objectives, the study constructs a small-scale, high-quality pig face detection dataset consisting of 1500 annotated images from a selection of 20 pigs. An independent detection model, trained on this dataset, then autonomously generates a large-scale pig face recognition dataset with 56 pig classes. In the face recognition stage, a robust teacher model guides the student model through a distillation process informed by a knowledge distillation loss, enabling the student model to learn relational features from the teacher. Experimental results confirm the high accuracy of the pig face detection model on the small-scale detection dataset and the ability to generate a large-scale dataset for pig face recognition on unlabeled data. The recognition experiments further verify that the distilled lightweight model outperforms its non-distilled counterparts and approaches the performance of the teacher model. This scalable, cost-effective solution shows significant promise for broader computer vision applications beyond agriculture.

Plant phenotyping is a critical field in agriculture, aiming to understand crop growth under specific conditions. Recent research uses images to describe plant characteristics by detecting visual information within organs such as leaves, flowers, stems, and fruits. However, processing data in real field conditions, with challenges such as image blurring and occlusion, requires improvement. This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach for leaf instance segmentation with a local refinement mechanism to enhance performance in cluttered backgrounds. The refinement mechanism employs Gaussian low-pass and High-boost filters to enhance target instances and can be applied to the training or testing dataset. An instance segmentation architecture generates segmented masks and detected areas, facilitating the derivation of phenotypic information, such as leaf count and size. Experimental results on a tomato leaf dataset demonstrate the system’s accuracy in segmenting target leaves despite complex backgrounds. The investigation of the refinement mechanism with different kernel sizes reveals that larger kernel sizes benefit the system’s ability to generate more leaf instances when using a High-boost filter, while prediction performance decays with larger Gaussian low-pass filter kernel sizes. This research addresses challenges in real greenhouse scenarios and enables automatic recognition of phenotypic data for smart agriculture. The proposed approach has the potential to enhance agricultural practices, ultimately leading to improved crop yields and productivity.

Unsupervised anomaly detection in multivariate time series sensor data is a complex task with diverse applications in different domains such as livestock farming and agriculture (LF&A), the Internet of Things (IoT), and human activity recognition (HAR). Advanced machine learning techniques are necessary to detect multi-sensor time series data anomalies. The primary focus of this research is to develop state-of-the-art machine learning methods for detecting anomalies in multi-sensor data. Time series sensors frequently produce multi-sensor data with anomalies, which makes it difficult to establish standard patterns that can capture spatial and temporal correlations. Our innovative approach enables the accurate identification of normal, abnormal, and noisy patterns, thus minimizing the risk of misinterpreting models when dealing with mixed noisy data during training. This can potentially result in the model deriving incorrect conclusions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called “TimeTector-Twin-Branch Shared LSTM Autoencoder” which incorporates several Multi-Head Attention mechanisms. Additionally, our system now incorporates the Twin-Branch method which facilitates the simultaneous execution of multiple tasks, such as data reconstruction and prediction error, allowing for efficient multi-task learning. We also compare our proposed model to several benchmark anomaly detection models using our dataset, and the results show less error (MSE, MAE, and RMSE) in reconstruction and higher accuracy scores (precision, recall, and F1) against the baseline models, demonstrating that our approach outperforms these existing models.

Accurate animal face recognition is essential for effective health monitoring, behavior analysis, and productivity management in smart farming. However, environmental obstructions and animal behaviors complicate identification tasks. In pig farming, fences and frequent movements often occlude essential facial features, while high inter-class similarity makes distinguishing individuals even more challenging. To address these issues, we introduce the Pig Face Recognition and Inpainting System (PigFRIS). This integrated framework enhances recognition accuracy by removing occlusions and restoring missing facial features. PigFRIS employs state-of-the-art occlusion detection with the YOLOv11 segmentation model, a GAN-based inpainting reconstruction module using AOT-GAN, and a lightweight recognition module tailored for pig face classification. In doing so, our system detects occlusions, reconstructs obscured regions, and emphasizes key facial features, thereby improving overall performance. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of PigFRIS. For instance, YOLO11l achieves a recall of 94.92% and a ${\mathrm{AP}}_{50}$ of 96.28% for occlusion detection, AOTGAN records a FID of 51.48 and an SSIM of 91.50% for image restoration, and EfficientNet-B2 attains an accuracy of 91.62% with an F1 Score of 91.44% in classification. Additionally, heatmap analysis reveals that the system successfully focuses on relevant facial features rather than irrelevant occlusions, enhancing classification reliability. This work offers a novel and practical solution for animal face recognition in smart farming. It overcomes the limitations of existing methods and contributes to more effective livestock management and advancements in agricultural technology.