Measurement of horses gaits using geo-sensors

Abstract

Measurement of horses gaits using geo-sensors PrefaceThis project was mainly related to the Signal Processing in terms of me, although it had some overlaps with the animal science. I found this project from the Prof. Niclas Björsell, he is my supervisor, so first I would like to thank him, he gave me many useful suggestions on the project plan, methods for analysis, and the report. The project was actually conducted by Mr.Bengt Julin from the Future Position X (FPX) in Teknik Parken of Gävle, he made great efforts on this project, coordinated the time of different people and arranged the measurements, also thanks for his hard work. Prof. Lars Roepstorff from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala is the expert of horses, he attended the measurement, and gave many professional recommendations on the measurement set-up and photographed the horse with his camera. Miss. Camilla Alsen and her colleagues from the Gävletravet gave great support to this project, and they provided the horse and the track. I am very appreciating for the support and understanding from all of them.There is one thing I should mention, since this project contains some secrets, so no appendices will be put in the end. Measurement of horses gaits using geo-sensors AbstractThe aim of this thesis is to determine the horse's gait types using the acceleration values measured from the horse. A measurement was taken in Gävletravet, a total of five Nanotrak sensors were used, four on the different parts of the horse, and one on the hand of the horse's driver, a car was driven parallel to the horse and the motions of the horse was recorded by a camera in order to synchronize with the data measured by the sensors, a total of four videos were recorded. The software to process the data was Matlab R2010b, and the methods to analyze them were Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT), and Least Squares (LS). Different window functions were tried when applying the STFT, and the Hanning window was the best to smooth the curves, different window sizes (or data length)were also tried, the data length of 512 was found to be the most proper value. The methods for classification of horse's gaits included amplitude, ratio, and LS. The method of amplitude worked well for the first three videos except for the last one, and performed better than the other two. The method of ratio was more reliable, but the results were not satisfactory. The method of LS gave bad results, so it was not trustworthy. More measurements and more analysis needed to be done in the future to find a proper way to automatic determine the horse's gaits, and the use of modern technology will be very popular in other fields like animal science.