For specific applications of infrared thermography (IRT) in the field of human medicine diagnosis, well defined standard operating procedures are used (e.g. controlled ambient conditions). In contrast, when IRT is used in the veterinary and animal science field, examinations are not always performed under controlled ambient conditions. This leads to unavoidable influences to the surface temperatures measured with IRT. This paper quantifies this effect and proposes a novel modelling and correction approach. This approach results in a significant increase in the quality of the data and provides a more accurate measurement of IRT for assessing animal health and welfare.1 Other IRT applications do not require absolute measurements e.g. symmetry analysis of temperature patterns. Fig. 1. Canadian Muskox at extreme ambient temperature http://dx.
Mastitis causes substantial economic losses and animal suffering in the dairy industry. The trend toward larger herd sizes complicates the monitoring of udder health in individual animals. Infrared thermography has successfully been used for early mastitis detection. However, manual thermogram analysis is time consuming and requires a skilled examiner, and automated image processing has not been tested. The aim of this study was to determine whether automatic evaluation of thermograms showed results comparable to those of manual evaluation of thermograms. Five healthy cows underwent an intramammary challenge with Escherichia coli to induce clinical mastitis. Multiple udder thermograms were taken every 2 h for 24 h before and after the challenge, resulting in 4,143 images in total. All images were evaluated using image recognition software (automatically) and a polygon tool (manually) to calculate the average and maximum surface temperatures. Because of the slightly different regions of interest, temperatures ascertained from the thermograms using the automatic method were consistently lower than those ascertained using the manual method. However, average udder surface temperatures evaluated using both methods were strongly correlated (r = 0.98 in the left hindquarter, and r = 0.99 in the right hindquarter) and showed maximum temperature peaks at the same time, 13 and 15 h after intramammary challenge. In the receiver operating characteristic analysis, both methods provided good results for sensitivity and specificity in detecting clinical E. coli-induced mastitis at different threshold values. For automatically evaluated maximum right hindquarter temperature, sensitivity was 93.75% and specificity was 94.96%, and for manually evaluated maximum right hindquarter temperature, sensitivity was 93.75% and specificity was 96.40%. Thus, automatic thermogram evaluation is a promising tool for automated mastitis detection.
In this work an automated traffic analysis in aerial image sequences recorded by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been developed, which provides the trajectories of the vehicles especially during overtaking. Methods of photogrammetry and image processing are used to detect the vehicles and to determine and track their positions. Camera calibration is necessary in order to transform image coordinates into world coordinates.
In this work an automated traffic analysis in aerial image sequences recorded by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been developed, which provides the trajectories of the vehicles especially during overtaking. Methods of photogrammetry and image processing are used to detect the vehicles and to determine and track their positions. Camera calibration is necessary in order to transform image coordinates into world coordinates.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.