A CNN-based Cow Interaction Watchdog

Animal behaviour and welfare can be studied/assessed by looking at different interactions occurring between the animals. Video recordings of a scene of interest are often made and then watched/evaluated by experts. However, the interactions of interest are often fairly rare. To reduce the amount of time the experts spend on watching the uninteresting video, this paper introduces an automated watchdog system that can discard some of the recorded video material. A pilot study on cows was made where a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) detector was used to count the number of cows in the scene and discard video where less than two cows were present. This removed 38 % of the recordings while only losing 1 % of the interesting video.