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ObjectiveThe monitoring of livestock grazing in natural pastures is a key aspect of the transformation and upgrading of large-scale breeding farms. In order to meet the demand for large-scale farms to achieve accurate real-time detection of a large number of sheep, a high-precision and easy-to-deploy small-target detection model: CSD-YOLOv8s was proposed to realize the real-time detection of small-targeted individual sheep under the high-altitude view of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).MethodsFirstly, a UAV was used to acquire video data of sheep in natural grassland pastures with different backgrounds and lighting conditions, and together with some public datasets downloaded formed the original image data. The sheep detection dataset was generated through data cleaning and labeling. Secondly, in order to solve the difficult problem of sheep detection caused by dense flocks and mutual occlusion, the SPPFCSPC module was constructed with cross-stage local connection based on the you only look once (YOLO)v8 model, which combined the original features with the output features of the fast spatial pyramid pooling network, fully retained the feature information at different stages of the model, and effectively solved the problem of small targets and serious occlusion of the sheep, and improved the detection performance of the model for small sheep targets. In the Neck part of the model, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) convolutional attention module was introduced to enhance the feature information capture based on both spatial and channel aspects, suppressing the background information spatially and focusing on the sheep target in the channel, enhancing the network's anti-jamming ability from both channel and spatial dimensions, and improving the model's detection performance of multi-scale sheep under complex backgrounds and different illumination conditions. Finally, in order to improve the real-time and deploy ability of the model, the standard convolution of the Neck network was changed to a lightweight convolutional C2f_DS module with a changeable kernel, which was able to adaptively select the corresponding convolutional kernel for feature extraction according to the input features, and solved the problem of input scale change in the process of sheep detection in a more flexible way, and at the same time, the number of parameters of the model was reduced and the speed of the model was improved.Results and DiscussionsThe improved CSD-YOLOv8s model exhibited excellent performance in the sheep detection task. Compared with YOLO, Faster R-CNN and other classical network models, the improved CSD-YOLOv8s model had higher detection accuracy and frames per second (FPS) of 87 f/s in the flock detection task with comparable detection speed and model size. Compared with the YOLOv8s model, Precision was improved from 93.0% to 95.2%, mAP was improved from 91.2% to 93.1%, and it had strong robustness to sheep targets with different degree of occlusion and different scales, which effectively solved the serious problems of missed and misdetection of sheep in the grassland pasture UAV-on-ground sheep detection task due to the small sheep targets, large background noise, and high degree of densification. misdetection serious problems. Validated by the PASCAL VOC 2007 open dataset, the CSD-YOLOv8s model proposed in this study improved the detection accuracy of 20 different objects, including transportation vehicles, animals, etc., especially in sheep detection, the detection accuracy was improved by 9.7%.ConclusionsThis study establishes a sheep dataset based on drone images and proposes a model called CSD-YOLOv8s for detecting grazing sheep in natural grasslands. The model addresses the serious issues of missed detections and false alarms in sheep detection under complex backgrounds and lighting conditions, enabling more accurate detection of grazing livestock in drone images. It achieves precise detection of targets with varying degrees of clustering and occlusion and possesses good real-time performance. This model provides an effective detection method for detecting sheep herds from the perspective of drones in natural pastures and offers technical support for large-scale livestock detection in breeding farms, with wide-ranging potential applications.

ObjectiveThe body size parameter of cattle is a key indicator reflecting the physical development of cattle, and is also a key factor in the cattle selection and breeding process. In order to solve the demand of measuring body size of beef cattle in the complex environment of large-scale beef cattle ranch, an image acquisition device and an automatic measurement algorithm of body size were designed.MethodsFirstly, the walking channel of the beef cattle was established, and when the beef cattle entered the restraining device through the channel, the RGB and depth maps of the image on the right side of the beef cattle were acquired using the Inter RealSense D455 camera. Secondly, in order to avoid the influence of the complex environmental background, an improved instance segmentation network based on Mask2former was proposed, adding CBAM module and CA module, respectively, to improve the model's ability to extract key features from different perspectives, extracting the foreground contour from the 2D image of the cattle, partitioning the contour, and comparing it with other segmentation algorithms, and using curvature calculation and other mathematical methods to find the required body size measurement points. Thirdly, in the processing of 3D data, in order to solve the problem that the pixel point to be measured in the 2D RGB image was null when it was projected to the corresponding pixel coordinates in the depth-valued image, resulting in the inability to calculate the 3D coordinates of the point, a series of processing was performed on the point cloud data, and a suitable point cloud filtering and point cloud segmentation algorithm was selected to effectively retain the point cloud data of the region of the cattle's body to be measured, and then the depth map was 16. Then the depth map was filled with nulls in the field to retain the integrity of the point cloud in the cattle body region, so that the required measurement points could be found and the 2D data could be returned. Finally, an extraction algorithm was designed to combine 2D and 3D data to project the extracted 2D pixel points into a 3D point cloud, and the camera parameters were used to calculate the world coordinates of the projected points, thus automatically calculating the body measurements of the beef cattle.Results and DiscussionsFirstly, in the part of instance segmentation, compared with the classical Mask R-CNN and the recent instance segmentation networks PointRend and Queryinst, the improved network could extract higher precision and smoother foreground images of cattles in terms of segmentation accuracy and segmentation effect, no matter it was for the case of occlusion or for the case of multiple cattles. Secondly, in three-dimensional data processing, the method proposed in the study could effectively extract the three-dimensional data of the target area. Thirdly, the measurement error of body size was analysed, among the four body size measurement parameters, the smallest average relative error was the height of the cross section, which was due to the more prominent position of the cross section, and the different standing positions of the cattle have less influence on the position of the cross section, and the largest average relative error was the pipe circumference, which was due to the influence of the greater overlap of the two front legs, and the higher requirements for the standing position. Finally, automatic body measurements were carried out on 137 beef cattle in the ranch, and the automatic measurements of the four body measurements parameters were compared with the manual measurements, and the results showed that the average relative errors of body height, cross section height, body slant length, and tube girth were 4.32%, 3.71%, 5.58% and 6.25%, respectively, which met the needs of the ranch. The shortcomings were that fewer body-size parameters were measured, and the error of measuring circumference-type body-size parameters was relatively large. Later studies could use a multi-view approach to increase the number of body rule parameters to be measured and improve the accuracy of the parameters in the circumference category.ConclusionsThe article designed an automatic measurement method based on two-dimensional and three-dimensional contactless body measurements of beef cattle. Moreover, the innovatively proposed method of measuring tube girth has higher accuracy and better implementation compared with the current research on body measurements in beef cattle. The relative average errors of the four body tape parameters meet the needs of pasture measurements and provide theoretical and practical guidance for the automatic measurement of body tape in beef cattle.

Objectives The aim of this study was to screen out the TLC conditions of malrine in Jin Weng Zhi Li Granule. Methods i Referring to the melhod of Chinese Veterinary Phtirnuieoia, the composition, chromogenic agent and expansion conditions of the developer were optimized, and malrine was qualitatively identified by TLC Results After optimizing TLC conditions of Jin Weng Zhi Li Granule, that is. the thin layer plate was pre-equilibrated in the expansion cylinder for 5 min after spotting, the separation effect of TLC of test samples was favorable. The spot color was clear, reproducibility was good, precision was high, specificity was better. Conclusions Hie melhod was of good feasibility, reproducibility and siecificity, and could be used for qualitative detection of malrine in Jin Weng Zhi Li Granule dampness-heal and diarrhea disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Objective] to explore and evaluate the safety of Jin Weng Zhi Li Extract on chickens. [Methods] 60 healthy chickens (3 weeks old) from Rongchang were grouped into four groups, i. e., blank group , one time the recommended dose group (0.4 g/kg), three times the recommended dose group (1.2g/kg), five times the recommended dose group (2.0 g/kg). Chickens in blank group were fed with norma saline by gastric infusion (0.5 mL per chicken) , and chickens were fed with Jin Weng Zhi Li extract solution by gastric infusion, 2 times a day, 14 consecutive days. During the experiment, the clinical manifestation of chickens were observed, the three major physiological indexes (breathing, pulse, body temperature), daily weight gain, blood routine examination and blood biochemical indexes were determined. The chickens used were dissected at the end of the experiment. Their internal organs were observed to determine if there're macroscopic lesions, and the organs were made into paraffin sections. Then histological observation of the paraffin sections was performed. [Results] The three major physiological indexes, blood routine examination and blood biochemical indexes were all within normal range and of no significant difference (P > 0.05); and no pathological lesions were found by observing the tissue section. [Conclusions] The experimental results indicated that the effect of Jin Weng Zhi Li Extract on the clinical manifestation, haematology and histology was within normal range, and it can be used clinically, and the dose of 1 time the recommended dose and 5 times the recommended dose was within the safe dose range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lis tract Objectives To scn-en TIJ- conditions of fosythin contained in Jin Weng Zhi Li (iranulr. Mel Im tils Affording lo the melhod described in Chinese Veterinary Pharmacopoeia, thin layer chromatography was used for rpialitalive identification of forsylhin contained in Jin Weng Zhi Li (irannle by improving the developing conditions. Results] After optimizing TLC conditions of Jin WengZhi li Grannie, that is, the thin layer plate was pre-equilibrated in the expansion cylinder for 5 min after spotting, the separation effect of TLC of test samples was favorable. The spot color was clear, reproducibility was good, precision was high, specificity was heller. Conclusions ] The mclhod is of good feasibility, reprodncibilily and specificity, and could be used for qualitative delcclion of forsylhin contained in Jin Weng Zhi li Granule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to overcome the problems of poor real-time performance, high false alarm rate and underreport alarm rate of mine external fire monitoring, a method of fire monitoring using the fusion of visible visual features is proposed.Firstly, the visual features corresponding to the video images of fire sources in different monitoring environments are analyzed, and the extraction methods of fire source texture, sharp corners, similarity coefficient and flicker frequency are designed.Then, an improved seed region growth algorithm is used to segment the suspected fire area, and different feature extraction methods are used to calculate the dynamic and static characteristics of the suspected fire area.Secondly, the extracted dynamic and static features are used to construct fire feature vectors.Finally, a fire monitoring model using BP neural network is constructed, and monitoring model is verified.The results show that the proposed fire monitoring method can effectively detect mine external fire in different scenes and distances.The correct rate and detection rate are 98.60% and 99.06%, respectively, the false detection rate is as low as 2.00%.It has strong anti-interference ability and robustness.

The complex working environment of mine leads to the degradation of the infrared image. The existing infrared image enhancement algorithm is easy to lose the scene details or causes the target edge blur while improving the signal-to-noise ratio and contrast. In order to solve the above problems, a mine infrared image enhancement algorithm based on dual domain decomposition coupling improved Gaussian Laplacian (ILoG) factor and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) (ILoG-CLAHE) is proposed. Firstly, the dual domain decomposition model is used to decompose the mine infrared image into a detailed sub-images containing high-frequency information and a basic sub-images containing low-frequency information. Secondly, the CLAHE algorithm is used to improve the brightness, contrast and definition of the basic sub-images to highlight the general features of the monitoring scene. The constructed ILoG operator is used to suppress noise and sharpen edges of detail sub-images and eliminate gradient inversion. Thirdly, the reconstructed image with improved image quality is obtained through the basic sub-image and detail sub-image after reconstruction processing. Finally, a Gamma correction function of gray level redistribution is designed to adjust the brightness of the reconstructed image. The mine infrared-enhanced image is obtained. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed by subjective vision and objective indicators. The results show that the overall visual effect and objective index of the mine infrared image enhanced by the mine infrared image enhancement algorithm based on dual domain and ILoG-CLAHE have been greatly improved. The comprehensive enhancement performance and robustness are better. Compared with the original mine infrared image and the six comparison algorithms, the comprehensive evaluation index values of this algorithm are increased by 0.28, 0.11, 0.23, 0.38, 0.57, 0.04, and 0.10 respectively. The six algorithms include CLAHE algorithm, bilateral filtering(BF) decomposition and CLAHE enhancement of basic sub-images (BF-CLAHE) algorithm, BF decomposition and Gamma transform (BF-Gamma) algorithm, guided filtering and Gamma transform (GF-Gamma) algorithm, adaptive histogram equalization(AHE) coupled Laplacian transform (AHE-LP) algorithm, and un-sharp mask(UM) based layer fusion (LF-UM) algorithm. The brightness, clarity and contrast of images are greatly improved, and noise suppression and edge sharpening are realized. It shows that the algorithm is suitable for the enhancement of infrared images in the complex working environment of mine.

Comprehensive Summary: Single‐nucleotide variants (SNVs) are crucial in disease development, but their accurate detection is challenging due to their low abundance and interference from wild‐type targets. Although nucleic acid analogs like peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) have been used for SNV detection, they often lack programmable sensitivity and specificity due to poorly calculated thermodynamics and kinetics. Here, we present a computational method for calculating the stacking energy of PNA and DNA hybrids, leveraging nearest neighbor parameters. Validation against experimental data from 16 sequences under varied hybridization conditions yielded good agreement using Bland‐Altman analysis, with all data points falling within the confidence interval. Our findings indicate that PNA‐DNA hybridization is thermodynamically more stable and exhibits kinetics 140‐fold faster than DNA‐DNA hybridization for identical sequences. Utilizing this computational framework, we designed PNA toehold probes, which were screened via simulations and experiments. This combined approach facilitated the identification of highly sensitive and specific PNA toehold probes for single point mutation detection via strand displacement reaction. Our results demonstrate the successful application of PNA toehold probes for detecting point mutations with high sensitivity and specificity, achieving a selective amplification of approximately 200‐fold for variants with a variant allele frequency (VAF) of 0.5% using quantitative polymerase chain reaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: In intelligent agriculture, non-contact, automatic body size measurement is widely used for livestock. However, the common measurement methods based on the whole point cloud are complex and prone to errors because of the positions of the cattle. To measure the body sizes of livestock more accurately, a cattle body measuring system is proposed. The system includes a new algorithm called dynamic unbalanced octree grouping (DUOS), based on PointNet++, and an efficient method of body size measurement based on segmentation results. The network divides the cow into the following seven parts: body length, withers height, hip height, thoracic circumference, abdominal circumference, and cannon circumference. Compared with some of the other models, the system has higher segmentation accuracy and lower measurement errors. The system can be widely applied in the non-contact body measurement of livestock; in addition, it can increase efficiency and reduce costs. It also has broad prospects in the intelligent livestock industry. The common non-contact, automatic body size measurement methods based on the whole livestock point cloud are complex and prone to errors. Therefore, a cattle body measuring system is proposed. The system includes a new algorithm called dynamic unbalanced octree grouping (DUOS), based on PointNet++, and an efficient method of body size measurement based on segmentation results. This system is suitable for livestock body feature sampling. The network divides the cow into seven parts, including the body and legs. Moreover, the key points of body size are located in the different parts. It combines density measurement, point cloud slicing, contour extraction, point cloud repair, etc. A total of 137 items of cattle data are collected. Compared with some of the other models, the DUOS algorithm improves the accuracy of the segmentation task and mean intersection by 0.53% and 1.21%, respectively. Moreover, compared with the manual measurement results, the relative errors of the experimental measurement results are as follows: withers height, 1.18%; hip height, 1.34%; body length, 2.52%; thoracic circumference, 2.12%; abdominal circumference, 2.26%; and cannon circumference, 2.78%. In summary, the model is proven to have a good segmentation effect on cattle bodies and is suitable for cattle body size measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]