Recognition of aggressive episodes of pigs based on convolutional neural network and long short-term memory

Aggression is considered as a major animal welfare problem in commercial pig farming. The aim of this study is to develop a deep learning method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) to recognise aggressive episodes of pigs. Compared to previous studies of pig behaviours based on deep learning, this study directly process video episodes rather than individual frames. In the experiment, nursery pigs (8/pen) were mixed for 3 days and then 8 h of video was recorded in each day. From these videos, 600 aggressive 2 s-episodes were manually selected and then augmented into 2400 episodes by using horizontal, vertical and diagonal mirroring. From the videos, 2400 non-aggressive 2 s-episodes were also manually selected. 80% of the data were randomly allocated as training set and the remaining 20% as validation set. Firstly, the CNN architecture VGG-16 was used to extract spatial features. These features were then input into LSTM framework to further extract temporal features. Through fully connected layer, the prediction function Softmax was finally used to determine if the current episode is aggression or non-aggression. Using the proposed method, aggressive episodes could be recognised with an accuracy of 97.2%. This result indicates that this method can be used to recognise aggressive episodes of pigs. Additionally, this paper further investigates the validity of this method under the conditions of skipping frames and reducing the episode length. The results show that a frame skipping approach whereby 30 fps is reduced into 15 fps within each 2 s-episode can improve the accuracy into 98.4% and halve the total running time.