The development and evaluation of image analysis procedures for guiding a livestock monitoring sensor placement robot

The over all objective of the work described here is to develop a robotic s ystem capable of holding a sensor in contact with any one of a set of pre-d etermined positions on the body of a loosely constrained live animal. This paper is concerned with generating sets of coordinates corresponding to the target points on the animal's body. The problem was approached using image analysis. Models were established to predict the positions of arbitrary po ints on the body of a pig from the positions of features in the image of th e periphery of the pig, which could be measured automatically. From measure ments of the movements of pigs in a feeding stall it was shown that the res ultant error in the predicted position of an arbitrary point on the pig's b ody was comparable to that which could be expected from a human operator. T he approach of using image analysis to guide a livestock monitoring sensor placement robot shows considerable Promise. and is worthy of further invest igation. Future work should concentrate on establishing the generality of t arget point prediction models. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights re served.