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A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry

The automated quantification of the behaviour of freely moving animals is increasingly needed in applied ethology. State-of-the-art approaches often require tags to identify animals, high computational power for data collection and processing, and are sensitive to environmental conditions, which lim...

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Autores principales: Dore, Alexandre, Pasquaretta, Cristian, Henry, Dominique, Ricard, Edmond, Bompa, Jean-François, Bonneau, Mathieu, Boissy, Alain, Hazard, Dominique, Lihoreau, Mathieu, Aubert, Hervé
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8662461/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34884145
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21238140
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author Dore, Alexandre
Pasquaretta, Cristian
Henry, Dominique
Ricard, Edmond
Bompa, Jean-François
Bonneau, Mathieu
Boissy, Alain
Hazard, Dominique
Lihoreau, Mathieu
Aubert, Hervé
author_facet Dore, Alexandre
Pasquaretta, Cristian
Henry, Dominique
Ricard, Edmond
Bompa, Jean-François
Bonneau, Mathieu
Boissy, Alain
Hazard, Dominique
Lihoreau, Mathieu
Aubert, Hervé
author_sort Dore, Alexandre
collection PubMed
description The automated quantification of the behaviour of freely moving animals is increasingly needed in applied ethology. State-of-the-art approaches often require tags to identify animals, high computational power for data collection and processing, and are sensitive to environmental conditions, which limits their large-scale utilization, for instance in genetic selection programs of animal breeding. Here we introduce a new automated tracking system based on millimetre-wave radars for real time robust and high precision monitoring of untagged animals. In contrast to conventional video tracking systems, radar tracking requires low processing power, is independent on light variations and has more accurate estimations of animal positions due to a lower misdetection rate. To validate our approach, we monitored the movements of 58 sheep in a standard indoor behavioural test used for assessing social motivation. We derived new estimators from the radar data that can be used to improve the behavioural phenotyping of the sheep. We then showed how radars can be used for movement tracking at larger spatial scales, in the field, by adjusting operating frequency and radiated electromagnetic power. Millimetre-wave radars thus hold considerable promises precision farming through high-throughput recording of the behaviour of untagged animals in different types of environments.
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spelling pubmed-86624612021-12-11 A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry Dore, Alexandre Pasquaretta, Cristian Henry, Dominique Ricard, Edmond Bompa, Jean-François Bonneau, Mathieu Boissy, Alain Hazard, Dominique Lihoreau, Mathieu Aubert, Hervé Sensors (Basel) Article The automated quantification of the behaviour of freely moving animals is increasingly needed in applied ethology. State-of-the-art approaches often require tags to identify animals, high computational power for data collection and processing, and are sensitive to environmental conditions, which limits their large-scale utilization, for instance in genetic selection programs of animal breeding. Here we introduce a new automated tracking system based on millimetre-wave radars for real time robust and high precision monitoring of untagged animals. In contrast to conventional video tracking systems, radar tracking requires low processing power, is independent on light variations and has more accurate estimations of animal positions due to a lower misdetection rate. To validate our approach, we monitored the movements of 58 sheep in a standard indoor behavioural test used for assessing social motivation. We derived new estimators from the radar data that can be used to improve the behavioural phenotyping of the sheep. We then showed how radars can be used for movement tracking at larger spatial scales, in the field, by adjusting operating frequency and radiated electromagnetic power. Millimetre-wave radars thus hold considerable promises precision farming through high-throughput recording of the behaviour of untagged animals in different types of environments. MDPI 2021-12-06 /pmc/articles/PMC8662461/ /pubmed/34884145 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21238140 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Dore, Alexandre
Pasquaretta, Cristian
Henry, Dominique
Ricard, Edmond
Bompa, Jean-François
Bonneau, Mathieu
Boissy, Alain
Hazard, Dominique
Lihoreau, Mathieu
Aubert, Hervé
A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry
title A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry
title_full A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry
title_fullStr A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry
title_full_unstemmed A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry
title_short A Non-Invasive Millimetre-Wave Radar Sensor for Automated Behavioural Tracking in Precision Farming—Application to Sheep Husbandry
title_sort non-invasive millimetre-wave radar sensor for automated behavioural tracking in precision farming—application to sheep husbandry
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8662461/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34884145
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21238140
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