Efficient Aggressive Behavior Recognition of Pigs Based on Temporal Shift Module

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Aggressive behavior can cause severe harm to pigs, especially in poor housing conditions, leading to disease and even death, which causes significant losses for the pig farm. Therefore, the automatic and accurate recognition of aggressive behavior of commercially housed pigs is important for pig farm production management. In this study, we proposed a video behavior recognition method based on the temporal shift module (TSM) that can detect whether aggressive behavior occurred in pig groups automatically. TSM is a convolutional neural network module to process video sequence data. Experimental results demonstrated that the method can recognize pig aggression effectively, which helps improve the use of automated management techniques in pig farming. ABSTRACT: Aggressive behavior among pigs is a significant social issue that has severe repercussions on both the profitability and welfare of pig farms. Due to the complexity of aggression, recognizing it requires the consideration of both spatial and temporal features. To address this problem, we proposed an efficient method that utilizes the temporal shift module (TSM) for automatic recognition of pig aggression. In general, TSM is inserted into four 2D convolutional neural network models, including ResNet50, ResNeXt50, DenseNet201, and ConvNext-t, enabling the models to process both spatial and temporal features without increasing the model parameters and computational complexity. The proposed method was evaluated on the dataset established in this study, and the results indicate that the ResNeXt50-T (TSM inserted into ResNeXt50) model achieved the best balance between recognition accuracy and model parameters. On the test set, the ResNeXt50-T model achieved accuracy, recall, precision, F1 score, speed, and model parameters of 95.69%, 95.25%, 96.07%, 95.65%, 29 ms, and 22.98 M, respectively. These results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of recognizing pig aggressive behavior and provide a reference for behavior recognition in actual scenarios of smart livestock farming.