Image Segmentation of Adjoining Pigs Using Spatio-Temporal Information

Recently, automatic video monitoring of individual pigs is emerging as an important issue in the management of group-housed pigs. Although a rich variety of studies have been reported on video monitoring techniques in intensive pig farming, it still requires further elaboration. In particular, when there exist adjoining pigs in a crowd pig room, it is necessary to have a way of separating adjoining pigs from the perspective of an image processing technique. In this paper, we propose an efficient image segmentation solution using both spatio-temporal information and region growing method for the identification of individual pigs in video surveillance systems. The experimental results with the videos obtained from a pig farm located in Sejong illustrated the efficiency of the proposed method.