Towards automatic farrowing monitoring—A Noisy Student approach for improving detection performance of newborn piglets

Nowadays, video monitoring of farrowing and automatic video evaluation using Deep Learning have become increasingly important in farm animal science research and open up new possibilities for addressing specific research questions like the determination of husbandry relevant indicators. A robust detection performance of newborn piglets is essential for reliably monitoring the farrowing process and to access important information about the welfare status of the sow and piglets. Although object detection algorithms are increasingly being used in various scenarios in the field of livestock farming, their usability for detecting newborn piglets has so far been limited. Challenges such as frequent animal occlusions, high overlapping rates or strong heterogeneous animal postures increase the complexity and place new demands on the detection model. Typically, new data is manually annotated to improve model performance, but the annotation effort is expensive and time-consuming. To address this problem, we propose a Noisy Student approach to automatically generate annotation information and train an improved piglet detection model. By using a teacher-student model relationship we transform the image structure and generate pseudo-labels for the object classes piglet and tail. As a result, we improve the initial detection performance of the teacher model from 0.561, 0.838, 0.672 to 0.901, 0.944, 0.922 for the performance metrics Recall, Precision and F1-score, respectively. The results of this study can be used in two ways. Firstly, the results contribute directly to the improvement of piglet detection in the context of birth monitoring systems and the evaluation of the farrowing progress. Secondly, the approach presented can be transferred to other research questions and species, thereby reducing the problem of cost-intensive annotation processes and increase training efficiency. In addition, we provide a unique dataset for the detection and evaluation of newborn piglets and sow body parts to support researchers in the task of monitoring the farrowing process.