Automated Object Tracking for Animal Behaviour Studies It can be an arduous and time consuming task to manually curate video data for tracking the movement of an object. This is particularly challenging when tracking animals whose behaviour is sporadic and unpredictable, but it can provide pertinent information when monitoring health, conditions and treatments. Here, we evaluate the use of machine learning retroactively applied to automatically track specific steers in hours of video with minimal manual interaction. This is approached using the Faster RCNN Object Detection algorithm with VGG16 acting as a feature extractor. Performance on a number of video segments is presented and discussed, and the issues encountered are outlined. This highlights a number of guidelines that should be taken under consideration when generating video data to improve object detection performance, and helps define the applicability of the approach to preexisting data.

Automated Video Behavior Recognition of Pigs Using TwoStream Convolutional Networks The detection of pig behavior helps detect abnormal conditions such as diseases and dangerous movements in a timely and effective manner, which plays an important role in ensuring the health and wellbeing of pigs. Monitoring pig behavior by staff is time consuming, subjective, and impractical. Therefore, there is an urgent need to implement methods for identifying pig behavior automatically. In recent years, deep learning has been gradually applied to the study of pig behavior recognition. Existing studies judge the behavior of the pig only based on the posture of the pig in a still image frame, without considering the motion information of the behavior. However, optical flow can well reflect the motion information. Thus, this study took image frames and optical flow from videos as twostream input objects to fully extract the temporal and spatial behavioral characteristics. Twostream convolutional network models based on deep learning were proposed, including inflated 3D convnet (I3D) and temporal segment networks (TSN) whose feature extraction network is Residual Network (ResNet) or the Inception architecture (e.g., Inception with Batch Normalization (BNInception), InceptionV3, InceptionV4, or InceptionResNetV2) to achieve pig behavior recognition. A standard pig video behavior dataset that included 1000 videos of feeding, lying, walking, scratching and mounting from five kinds of different behavioral actions of pigs under natural conditions was created. The dataset was used to train and test the proposed models, and a series of comparative experiments were conducted. The experimental results showed that the TSN model whose feature extraction network was ResNet101 was able to recognize pig feeding, lying, walking, scratching, and mounting behaviors with a higher average of 98.99%, and the average recognition time of each video was 0.3163 s. The TSN model (ResNet101) is superior to the other models in solving the task of pig behavior recognition.