Real-Time Acoustic Monitoring of Foraging Behavior of Grazing Cattle Using Low-Power Embedded Devices

Precision livestock farming allows farmers to optimize herd management while significantly reducing labor needs. Individualized monitoring of cattle feeding behavior offers valuable data to assess animal performance and provides valuable insights into animal welfare. Current acoustic foraging activity recognizers achieve high recognition rates operating on computers. However, their implementations on portable embedded systems (for use on farms) need further investigation. This work presents two embedded deployments of a state-of-the-art foraging activity recognizer on a low-power ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller. The parameters of the algorithm were optimized to reduce power consumption. The embedded algorithm processes masticatory sounds in real-time and uses machine-learning techniques to identify grazing, rumination and other activities. The overall classification performance of the two embedded deployments achieves an 84% and 89% balanced accuracy with a mean power consumption of 1.8 mW and 12.7 mW, respectively. These results will allow this deployment to be integrated into a self-powered acoustic sensor with wireless communication to operate autonomously on cattle.