Search

Graphical abstract, Highlights • The experiments with military working dogs (MWDs) as a special case were carried out. • Osteoarthritis is a common inflammatory disease in MWDs. • We evaluated a mixture of natural botanicals as a dietary supplement. • This supplementation had positive effects on hematological and serological values. • Results provided support for the development of a feed supplement for MWDs., The health of military working dogs (MWDs) deployed with Korean troops is of prime importance. The aim of our study was to investigate the hematologic and serologic status of Korean MWDs given natural botanical supplements. To do this, 11 natural botanicals were selected based on relevant references and combined to supplement MWDs. Throughout the 16-week experimental periods, there was no significant difference in body weights of individual dogs. The Hemoglobin (HGB), hematocrit (HCT), Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV), and Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin (MCH) values were slightly higher in the group given the supplement. On the other hand, the Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin Concentration (MCHC) values were slightly lower. Changes in platelet, lymphocyte, and basophil counts were observed in the supplemented group. The median serum IL-6 level did not differ significantly between the supplemented and control groups. However, the mean serum C-reactive protein (CRP) value increased significantly from the start of supplementation to 8 weeks, and then decreased at 16 weeks. Taken together, our result suggests that the health condition of most MWDs supplemented with natural botanicals was gradually improved. Thus, this study may provide support for the development of a feed supplement for MWDs using natural botanicals.

Visual object tracking is an essential technique for constructing intelligent livestock management systems. Behavior patterns estimated from the trajectories of animals provide substantial useful information related to estrus cycle, disease prognosis and so on. However, similar colors and shapes between animals often lead to the failure of tracking multiple objects, and the background clutter of the breeding space further makes the problem intractable. In this paper, we propose a novel method for tracking animals using a single thermal sensor. The key idea of the proposed method is to represent the foreground (i.e., animals) easily obtained by a simple thresholding in a thermal frame as a topographic surface, which is very helpful for finding the boundary of each object even in cases with overlapping. Based on the segmentation results derived from morphological operations on the topographic surface, the center positions of all the animals are consistently updated with an efficient refinement scheme that is robust to the abrupt motions of animals. Experimental results using various thermal video sequences demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our method for tracking animals in a breeding space compared to previous approaches proposed in the literature.

This experiment was conducted to improve estrus detection using a thermal sensor based on multiple object tracking system. A total of six Hanwoo (Korean native beef cattle, BW= 404 ± 58 kg) were used in this study. They were housed in a 5 × 10 m pen by three animals per replication. The total amount of moving distance and feed intake were measured before and after estrus period. The infrared thermography camera (FLIR A615, FLIR SYSTEMS, USA) was placed approximately 9 m above ground to take thermal images. The video files were analyzed to calculate moving distance of experimental animals by the tracking system which was developed by our previous research. Each animal in a pen was tracked on thermal video files, and then moving distances were calculated by topographic surface-based object segmentation, velocity weight, and the river-bed refinement. Feed intake was calculated every day at 0900 by weighing residual feed. On the day before estrus, the total moving distance of experimental animals was 6,434 m (Pen 1= 6,873 m, Pen 2= 5,995m), whereas it was 15,121 m (Pen 1= 17,434 m and Pen 2= 12,808 m) on the estrus day, showing 2.35 times increase (P < 0.05) in moving activity. Feed intake was decreased (P < 0.05) by 11% on estrus day (29.4 vs. 26.1 kg). A decrease in feed intake and an increase in movement of beef cattle on the estrus day, were obvious signs that have been well documented not only in previous researches and but empirical knowledge. In this study, however, the exact moving distance of Korean native beef cattle was calculated by the thermal imaging video tracking system. Therefore, this multiple object tracking system could be applied in practice to detect estrus of beef cattle.

This research was conducted to grasp the present condition of environmental management relating to Korea detector dogs that performed their duties such as detection and lifesaving. We directly conducted a survey throughout visit to five government agencies. In environmental management case, average length and width of kennels were 1.78 m and 3.50 m, respectively. Types of floor were searched as coating cement, tile, ucrete and concrete. Most of government agencies ventilated kennels using ventilation fan systems with natural ventilation. But there were differences between government agencies in frequencies of the sanitary management items. On the other side, major diseases of the German shepherd breed as a major detector dog were in order of arthritis, measles, earache, and dermatosis. And their daily training time was average 4 hours. Finally, it is thought that these results could be used as a basic data of standard breeding management manual of Korea detector dog.( Key words

Although the livestock excretion is a significant resource in providing nutrients to the crops as it is recycled, it has been perceived as the cause of environmental pollutions for its inappropriate treatment and quality control issues. The study is aimed to develop an integrated management system for efficient management of livestock excretion using the Ubiquitous technology, and the user requirements are analyzed for development of such system. As the result of analysis on the requirements, it has been proved that such system is perceived to be necessary and the demand for several main functions can be seen as well.

The National Geographic Information System (NGIS) configuration project that started from 1995. The GIS projects led by the nation were conducted for a wide range of fields for around 20 years, yet there was no national GIS project executed in the field of livestock. The study is intended to examine the previous national GIS projects, propose the databases and application systems to be built for GIS application and promote applicability of GIS in the field of livestock based on these examination and proposal.

Video digital door lock(VDDL) system detects people who access to the door and acquires the human image. Design considerations is that current consumption must be minimized by applying fast human detection algorithm because of battery-based operation. Since the digital door lock takes an image through a fixed camera, detection of a person based on background image leads to high degree of reliability. This paper deals with a single human detection algorithm suitable for VDDL with fulfilling these requirements such that it detects a moving object in an image, then identifies whether the object is a person or not using image processing. The proposed image processing algorithm consists of two steps: Firstly, it detects the human image region using both background image and skin color information. Secondly, it identifies the person using polar histogram based on proportional information of human body. Proposed algorithm is implemented in VDDL and is verified the performance through experiments.

This study was conducted to identify various habits of stable vices and its occurring frequency in racing horses, currently managed in Korea, through categorizing the total 1,386 head of racing horses in Seoul Racing Park into sex, age and years of stabling. Among the 1,386 horses, 524 heads (37.8%) have shown habits of stable vices and its appearances rate according to each category is as following; While 40.7% of stallions showed the highest appearances rate of stable vices by sex, it was 50%, 44.2%, and 53% for the age of 2, 6 and 4, respectively by age, it was 41%, 40.6% and 39.1% for the years of stabling of 2, 4 and 3, respectively. For the appearances rate of individual stable vices, 7.0% of mares showed the highest appearances rate of ‘kicking at walls’, 12.9% of stallions showed ‘biting habit’ and 5.7% of castrated horses showed ‘weaving’ when grouped by sex. According to age, 8.3%, and 6.1% of horses of age 2 showed ‘kicking at walls’, ‘wind-sucking’ and ‘pawing’, respectively while 4.9% of horses of age 3 showed ‘pawing’, 6.4% of horses of age 4 showed ‘kicking at walls’, 6.8% of horses of age 5 showed ‘kicking at walls’ and ‘biting habit’ and 8.7% of horses of age 6 showed ‘weaving’ and ‘biting habit’. By the year of stabling, 6% of horses for 1 year had ‘pawing habit’, 7% og horses for 2 years had ‘kicking at walls’, 7.4% of horses for 3 years had ‘biting habit’ and it was 6.9% and 10.6% for ‘weaving’ for 4 and 5 years of stabling, respectively. In conclusion, the racing horses in Korea seemed to show high rate of appearance rate of stable vices and it is considered to be necessary to improve stable equipments and management skills to reduce the appearance rate of stable vices.(

To evaluate the effect of fiber sources on chewing activity, five sheep were consecutively fed diets containing 45% of a fiber source selected from 7 tested fiber sources of alfalfa hay cube (AHC), corn cob (CC), corn silage (CS), cotton seed hull (CSH), peanut hull (PHL), rice straw (RS) and sugarcane bagasse (SCB). Number of chew showed significantly higher value in CC (p

For interactive mixed reality applications, a novel human body detection and tracking method is presented. The method automatically detects moving body regions and tracks them continuously until they disappear from the camera field of view. Two main cues, skin color and motion, are used to track visual attentions. The method can be used for applications of the attention based human-computer interfaces where attentions are mostly focused on human body parts. In our experiments, the method provided correct results whenever at least a patch of moving body parts was disclosed with skin color.

Congenital neonatal neuroblastoma is not uncommon but bilateral adrenal neuroblastoma is rare, accounting for about ten percent of neuroblastomas in children. We report the US and MR findings of a stage IV-S congenital bilateral neuroblastoma occurring in a one-day-old neonate.