A portable and automatic Xtion-based measurement system for pig body size

Body measurement plays an important role in animal breeding and production. In this paper, we develop a novel portable and automatic measurement system for pig body size. Firstly, we utilize two depth cameras to capture the point clouds of the scene with a pig from two viewpoints and implement the registration of the obtained point clouds. Secondly, we resort to Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) to remove the background point cloud and extract the foreground pig point cloud with a Euclidean clustering. Finally, body measurement is conducted via pose normalization and morphological constraints on pig cloud. We evaluate the proposed system on 20 sets of the scenes with a pig in a commercial pig farm. Experimental results show that the pig object extraction algorithm achieves good performance. The average relative errors for body width, hip width, and body height are 10.30%, 5.87% and 7.01% respectively, which demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed system.