Framework of Cow Calving Monitoring System Using a Single Depth Camera

Calving difficulty is the primary cause of the problem of increasing death loss in cow-calf. It also profoundly effects on the economic impact of farmers and producers because of calves' death, injury to cows and high veterinary cost. To help the calving difficult of cows in time, long time continuous monitoring is required for deciding when and how to assist the calving process of cows. On the other hand, the continuous monitoring of cows' welfare become the major burden task for labors especially in a large farm where has a large number of cows. Therefore, the demands of sophisticated technology for automatic monitoring of cows' welfare is more and more increasing every year. In recent years, some researcher develops the automatics monitoring and predicting the cows' calving behavior by using the sensors devices such as temperature sensors and acceleration sensors. However, the sensors based system has various problems such as spalling and malfunction of the sensors and even can cause the burden on the cow because sensors are needed to put inside or on the body of the cow. To overcome those problems, in this paper, we propose an automatic detection of cows' calving behavior by using the depth camera (3D camera) along with image processing and computer vision technology and coordinate system transformation concept. The proposed system by using 3D camera can reduce the burden of both labors and cows.