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Livestock feeding behaviour is an influential research area for those involved in animal husbandry and agriculture. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in automated systems for monitoring the behaviour of ruminants. Despite the developments accomplished in the last decade, there is still much to do and learn about the methods for measuring and analysing livestock feeding behaviour. Automated monitoring systems mainly use motion, acoustic, and image sensors to collect animal behavioural data. The performance evaluation of existing methods is a complex task and direct comparisons between studies are difficult. Several factors prevent a direct comparison, starting from the diversity of data and performance metrics used in the experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first tutorial-style review on the analysis of the feeding behaviour of ruminants, emphasising the relationship between sensing methodologies, signal processing, and computational intelligence methods. It assesses the main sensing methodologies (i.e. based on movement, sound, images/videos, and pressure) and the main techniques to measure and analyse the signals associated with feeding behaviour, evaluating their use in different settings and situations. It also highlights the potentiality of automated monitoring systems to provide valuable information that improves our understanding of livestock feeding behaviour. The relevance of these systems is increasingly important due to their impact on production systems and research. Finally, the paper closes by discussing future challenges and opportunities in livestock feeding behaviour monitoring., Comment: Preprint submitted to the journal biosystems engineering

Farmers must continuously improve their livestock production systems to remain competitive in the growing dairy market. Precision livestock farming technologies provide individualized monitoring of animals on commercial farms, optimizing livestock production. Continuous acoustic monitoring is a widely accepted sensing technique used to estimate the daily rumination and grazing time budget of free-ranging cattle. However, typical environmental and natural noises on pastures noticeably affect the performance limiting the practical application of current acoustic methods. In this study, we present the operating principle and generalization capability of an acoustic method called Noise-Robust Foraging Activity Recognizer (NRFAR). The proposed method determines foraging activity bouts by analyzing fixed-length segments of identified jaw movement events produced during grazing and rumination. The additive noise robustness of the NRFAR was evaluated for several signal-to-noise ratios using stationary Gaussian white noise and four different nonstationary natural noise sources. In noiseless conditions, NRFAR reached an average balanced accuracy of 86.4%, outperforming two previous acoustic methods by more than 7.5%. Furthermore, NRFAR performed better than previous acoustic methods in 77 of 80 evaluated noisy scenarios (53 cases with p<0.05). NRFAR has been shown to be effective in harsh free-ranging environments and could be used as a reliable solution to improve pasture management and monitor the health and welfare of dairy cows. The instrumentation and computational algorithms presented in this publication are protected by a pending patent application: AR P20220100910. Web demo available at: https://sinc.unl.edu.ar/web-demo/nrfar, Comment: list of used audio-clips is available in the list_audio_clips.xlsx

Precision livestock farming optimizes livestock production through the use of sensor information and communication technologies to support decision making, proactively and near real-time. Among available technologies to monitor foraging behavior, the acoustic method has been highly reliable and repeatable, but can be subject to further computational improvements to increase precision and specificity of recognition of foraging activities. In this study, an algorithm called Jaw Movement segment-based Foraging Activity Recognizer (JMFAR) is proposed. The method is based on the computation and analysis of temporal, statistical and spectral features of jaw movement sounds for detection of rumination and grazing bouts. They are called JM-segment features because they are extracted from a sound segment and expect to capture JM information of the whole segment rather than individual JMs. Two variants of the method are proposed and tested: (i) the temporal and statistical features only JMFAR-ns; and (ii) a feature selection process (JMFAR-sel). The JMFAR was tested on signals registered in a free grazing environment, achieving an average weighted F1-score of 93%. Then, it was compared with a state-of-the-art algorithm, showing improved performance for estimation of grazing bouts (+19%). The JMFAR-ns variant reduced the computational cost by 25.4%, but achieved a slightly lower performance than the JMFAR. The good performance and low computational cost of JMFAR-ns supports the feasibility of using this algorithm variant for real-time implementation in low-cost embedded systems. The method presented within this publication is protected by a pending patent application: AR P20220100910., Comment: Preprint submitted to journal