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Re-identification for long-term tracking and management of health and welfare challenges in pigs

2025· article· en· W4407366645 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueBiosystems Engineering · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldVeterinary
TopicAnimal Behavior and Welfare Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research CouncilHorizon 2020Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilDirectorate for Biological SciencesEuropean CommissionQueen's UniversityQueen's University Belfast
KeywordsWelfareTerm (time)Identification (biology)Tracking (education)BusinessPublic economicsEconomicsBiologyPsychologyEcologyMarket economyPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The fine-grained management of farm animals using video analytics relies on long-term visual tracking of individual animals. When an individual is occluded or exits the camera's field of view, tracking can be lost. The problem of using visual features to re-assign identity after loss of tracking is known as re-identification. In the case of pigs , this problem is especially challenging due to the similar appearances of most individual animals within a pen. To address this issue, an image-based pig re-identification method is developed that is invariant to pose, illumination, and camera viewpoint. This method allows pigs to be reidentified, enabling long-term monitoring. This approach uses a Vision-Transformer model (ViT) previously developed for person re-identification. The model was trained using specifically designed pig re-identification datasets with a diverse range of housing and management conditions. These datasets use overhead cameras, allowing an investigation of the effect of the detection approach on re-identification performance. Re-identification using a traditional axis-aligned pig detector was compared with a recently developed oriented pig detector that better matches the pig's pose when extracting the pig from the wider image. It was found that the use of an oriented detector led to improved performance. The proposed system achieved a peak rank-1 Cumulative Matching Characteristic (CMC) performance of 90.5%. Furthermore, it is shown that this model is capable of generalising across different farms, achieving an average rank-1 CMC 81.8% in the cross-farm setting. Finally, the proposed re-identification features can be incorporated into an existing multi-object tracking system to improve its performance at reacquiring pig identities when tracking is lost. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential of using visual re-identification features of pigs to enable individual-level animal management.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.437
Threshold uncertainty score0.392

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.093
GPT teacher head0.342
Teacher spread0.249 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it