Smart Decision-Support System for Pig Farming

Abstract

There are multiple participants, such as farmers, wholesalers, retailers, financial institutions, etc., involved in the modern food production process. All of these participants and stakeholders have a shared goal, which is to gather information on the food production process so that they can make appropriate decisions to increase productivity and reduce risks. However, real-time data collection and analysis continue to be difficult tasks, particularly in developing nations, where agriculture is the primary source of income for the majority of the population. In this paper, we present a smart decision-support system for pig farming. Specifically, we first adopt rail-based unmanned vehicles to capture pigsty images. We then conduct image stitching to avoid double-counting pigs so that we can use image segmentation method to give precise masks for each pig. Based on the segmentation masks, the pig weights can be estimated, and data can be integrated in our developed mobile app. The proposed system enables the above participants and stakeholders to have real-time data and intelligent analysis reports to help their decision-making.