Automatic infrared based temperature measuring system for health monitoring in veterinary applications

Within the interdisciplinary R&D project VIONA a novel measuring system was developed to investigate the potential of an automatic infrared (IR) based health monitoring of dairy cows. The project faces three challenging tasks necessary for automation: the precise IR temperature measurement under rough practical conditions, the automatic image processing providing an anatomically related segmentation and the diagnostic algorithm finally selecting diseased animals. This paper gives a summarizing overview of the developed research platform VIONA, which fulfils the practical requirements and helps to perform the largest known IR based field study for dairy cows.