Automated detection of cattle mounting using side-view camera

Abstract

Automatic detection of estrus in cows is important in cattle management. This paper proposes a method of estrus detection by automatically checking cattle mounting. We use a side-view video camera and apply computer vision techniques to detect mounting behavior. In particular, we extract motion information to select a potential mount-up and mount-down motion and then verify the true mounting behavior by considering the direction, magnitude, and history of the mount motion. From experimental results using video data obtained from a Korean native cattle farm, we believe that the proposed method based on the abrupt change of a mounting cow’s height and motion history information can be utilized for detecting mounting behavior automatically, even in the case of fence occlusion.