Real-time monitoring tool for pig welfare

Recently, the support for improving animal welfare in livestock farming has been increased in the EU. The objective of this research is to develop an automatic camera-based system for continuously monitoring of the pigs' behaviour in a contactless way in order to understand the effect of environment on pigs. Therefore, a measure for the activity level calculated from camera images was proposed. The activity index was calculated for the group of pigs as the fraction of the floor space in the pen that contained motion in between two subsequent camera images. Finally, the effect of environment enrichment and its induced behaviour on the activity level of pigs is quantified. This suggests that in these experimental conditions, the increase in the activity level following the introduction of the environment enrichments accounted for 34.3% of the total activity level.