title: Intelligent strategies for sheep monitoring and management
Creators: name: Kleanthous, N
Publisher: name: Liverpool John Moores University
Year: 2021

description: With the growth in world population, there is an increasing demand for food resources and better land utilisation, e.g., domesticated animals and land management, which in turn brought about developments in intelligent farming. Modern farms rely upon intelligent sensors and advanced software solutions, to optimally manage pasture and support animal welfare. A very significant aspect in domesticated animal farms is monitoring and understanding of animal activity, which provides vital insight into animal well-being and the environment they live in. Moreover, “virtual” fencing systems provide an alternative to managing farmland by replacing traditional boundaries. This thesis proposes novel solutions to animal activity recognition based on accelerometer data using machine learning strategies, and supports the development of virtual fencing systems via animal behaviour management using audio stimuli. The first contribution of this work is four datasets comprising accelerometer gait signals. The first dataset consisted of accelerometer and gyroscope measurements, which were obtained using a Samsung smartphone on seven animals. Next, a dataset of accelerometer measurements was collected using the MetamotionR device on 8 Hebridean ewes. Finally, two datasets of nine Hebridean ewes were collected from two sensors (MetamotionR and Raspberry Pi) comprising of accelerometer signals describing active, inactive and grazing activity of the animal. These datasets will be made publicly available as there is limited availability of such datasets. In respect to activity recognition, a systematic study of the experimental setup, associated signal features and machine learning methods was performed. It was found that Random Forest using accelerometer measurements and a sample rate of 12.5Hz with a sliding window of 5 seconds provides an accuracy of above 96% when discriminating animal activity. The problem of sensor heterogeneity was addressed with transfer learning of Convolutional Neural Networks, which has been used for the first time in this problem, and resulted to an accuracy of 98.55%, and 96.59%, respectively, in the two experimental datasets. Next, the feasibility of using only audio stimuli in the context of a virtual fencing system was explored. Specifically, a systematic evaluation of the parameters of audio stimuli, e.g., frequency and duration, was performed on two sheep breeds, Hebridean and Greyface Dartmoor ewes, in the context of controlling animal position and keeping them away from a designated area. It worth noting that the use of sounds is different to existing approaches, which utilize electric shocks to train animals to adhere within the boundaries of a virtual fence. It was found that audio signals in the frequencies of 125Hz-440Hz, 10kHz-17kHz and white noise are able to control animal activity with accuracies of 89.88%, and 95.93%, for Hebridean and Greyface Dartmoor ewes, respectively. Last but not least, the thesis proposes a multifunctional system that identifies whether the animal is active or inactive, using transfer learning, and manipulates its position using the optimized sound settings achieving a classification accuracy of over 99.95%.