Effective and accurate discrimination of individual dairy cattle through acoustic sensing

Singh, Yajuvendra; Lathwal, S. S.; Rajput, Nitendra; Raja, T. V.; Gupta, Ashok Kumar; Mohanty, T.K.; Ruhil, A. P.; Chakravarty, A. K.; Sharma, Prakash Chandra; Sharma, Vijay Kumar; Chandra, Gulab

doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2013.03.008

Cited by 30 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Cattle calls contain information on individuality due to high levels of inter-cow variability in the acoustic characteristic of their vocalizations. This allows for each animal to be identified by the 'uniqueness' of their call [138][139][140][141]. Cattle are herd animals, and isolation from their conspecifics results in physiological changes in the animal such as increased heart rate, salivary cortisol, urination and defecation rates, and an increase in vocal responses [142].…”

Section: Cattlementioning

confidence: 99%

Automated bioacoustics: methods in ecology and conservation and their potential for animal welfare monitoring

Mcloughlin

Stewart

McElligott

2019

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Vocalizations carry emotional, physiological and individual information. This suggests that they may serve as potentially useful indicators for inferring animal welfare. At the same time, automated methods for analysing and classifying sound have developed rapidly, particularly in the fields of ecology, conservation and sound scene classification. These methods are already used to automatically classify animal vocalizations, for example, in identifying animal species and estimating numbers of individuals. Despite this potential, they have not yet found widespread application in animal welfare monitoring. In this review, we first discuss current trends in sound analysis for ecology, conservation and sound classification. Following this, we detail the vocalizations produced by three of the most important farm livestock species: chickens ( Gallus gallus domesticus ), pigs ( Sus scrofa domesticus ) and cattle ( Bos taurus ). Finally, we describe how these methods can be applied to monitor animal welfare with new potential for developing automated methods for large-scale farming.

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Section: Cattlementioning

confidence: 99%

Automated bioacoustics: methods in ecology and conservation and their potential for animal welfare monitoring

Mcloughlin

Stewart

McElligott

2019

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…The individuality of vocalisations Not only is there high variability in the propensity of cattle to express calls , but numerous studies have also reported high inter-cow variability in the acoustic characteristics of vocalisations (Barfield et al, 1994;Yajuvendra et al, 2013;Padilla de la Torre et al, 2016). This variability between cattle surpasses any variability within cattle and contributes to the individual distinctiveness of the calls (Kiley, 1972).…”

Section: The Vocalisations Of Cattle Within the Herd And Use In Advanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Vocalisations of cattle are typically harmonic in nature and generally range between 1.3 and 1.5 s in duration (Kiley, 1972;Padilla de la Torre et al, 2015). A multitude of their acoustic parameters show individual distinctiveness, the most significant ones being the mean F0 and its range, formant frequencies, jitter and shimmer, noise-to-harmonic ratio, number of pulses and degree of voice break (Yajuvendra et al, 2013). These relate to the source and filter parameters as previously explained.…”

Section: The Vocalisations Of Cattle Within the Herd And Use In Advanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Invited review: The evolution of cattle bioacoustics and application for advanced dairy systems

Green

Johnston

Clark

2018

Animal

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Vocalisations are commonly expressed by gregarious animals, including cattle, as a form of short- and long-distance communication. They can provide conspecifics with meaningful information about the physiology, affective state and physical attributes of the caller. In cattle, calls are individually distinct meaning they assist animals to identify specific individuals in the herd. Consequently, there is potential for these vocalisations to be acoustically analysed to make inferences about how individual animals or herds are coping with their external surroundings, and then act on these signals to improve feed conversion efficiency, reproductive efficiency and welfare. In the case of dairy farming, where herd sizes are expanding and farmers are becoming more reliant on technologies to assist in the monitoring of cattle, the study of vocal behaviour could provide an objective, cost effective and non-invasive alternative to traditional measures of welfare. The vocalisations of cattle in response to calf separation, social isolation and painful husbandry procedures, alongside changes to feeding and oestrous activity are here reviewed. For future application of sound technology, research is first necessary to analyse the acoustic structure of cattle vocalisations and determine the specific information they encode. This review draws together the latest research in field of cattle bioacoustics highlighting how the source-filter theory and affective state dimensional approach can be adopted to decode this information and improve on-farm management.

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“…Various technical approaches have been used to assess the vocalisations of animals, particularly those of farm animals. Yajuvendra et al (2013) chose to detect individual cows by applying speech analysis techniques to samples of cattle vocalisations. This approach requires a set of sample vocalisations for each animal, so that the selected parameters can be recorded.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, while the assignment to a specific individual animal (henceforth termed 'caller identification') is not essential for cough detection in pigs, it is essential for oestrus detection. Yajuvendra et al (2013) tried to solve the problem of caller identification by using individual structural characteristics in vocalisations. Similar techniques have been used in wildlife species (e.g., in blue monkeys: Mielke and Zuberbühler, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic recording of individual oestrus vocalisation in group-housed dairy cattle: development of a cattle call monitor

Röttgen

Schön

Becker

et al. 2020

Animal

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Oestrus detection remains a problem in the dairy cattle industry. Therefore, automatic detection systems have been developed to detect specific behavioural changes at oestrus. Vocal behaviour has not been considered in such automatic oestrus detection systems in cattle, though the vocalisation rate is known to increase during oestrus. The main challenge in using vocalisation to detect oestrus is correctly identifying the calling individual when animals are moving freely in large groups, as oestrus needs to be detected at an individual level. Therefore, we aimed to automate vocalisation recording and caller identification in group-housed dairy cows. This paper first presents the details of such a system and then presents the results of a pilot study validating its functionality, in which the automatic detection of calls from individual heifers was compared to video-based assessment of these calls by a trained human observer, a technique that has, until now, been considered the ‘gold standard’. We developed a collar-based cattle call monitor (CCM) with structure-borne and airborne sound microphones and a recording unit and developed a postprocessing algorithm to identify the caller by matching the information from both microphones. Five group-housed heifers, each in the perioestrus or oestrus period, were equipped with a CCM prototype for 5 days. The recorded audio data were subsequently analysed and compared with audiovisual recordings. Overall, 1404 vocalisations from the focus heifers and 721 vocalisations from group mates were obtained. Vocalisations during collar changes or malfunctions of the CCM were omitted from the evaluation. The results showed that the CCM had a sensitivity of 87% and a specificity of 94%. The negative and positive predictive values were 80% and 96%, respectively. These results show that the detection of individual vocalisations and the correct identification of callers are possible, even in freely moving group-housed cattle. The results are promising for the future use of vocalisation in automatic oestrus detection systems.

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Effective and accurate discrimination of individual dairy cattle through acoustic sensing

Cited by 30 publications

References 25 publications

Automated bioacoustics: methods in ecology and conservation and their potential for animal welfare monitoring

Automated bioacoustics: methods in ecology and conservation and their potential for animal welfare monitoring

Invited review: The evolution of cattle bioacoustics and application for advanced dairy systems

Automatic recording of individual oestrus vocalisation in group-housed dairy cattle: development of a cattle call monitor

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