Recognition of Cattle's Feeding Behaviors Using Noseband Pressure Sensor With Machine Learning

Abstract

Automatic monitoring of feeding behavior especially rumination and eating in cattle is important to keep track of animal health and growth condition and disease warnings. The noseband pressure sensor is not only able to accurately sense the pressure change of the cattle's jaw movements, which can directly reflect the cattle's chewing behavior, but also has strong resistance to interference. However, it is difficult to keep the same initial pressure while wearing the pressure sensor, and this will pose a challenge to process the feeding behavior data. This article proposed a machine learning approach aiming at eliminating the influence of initial pressure on the identification of rumination and eating behaviors. The method mainly used the local slope to obtain the local data variation and combined Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract the frequency-domain features. Extreme Gradient Boosting Algorithm (XGB) was performed to classify the features of rumination and eating behaviors. Experimental results showed that the local slope in combination with frequency-domain features achieved an F1 score of 0.96, and recognition accuracy of 0.966 in both rumination and eating behaviors. Combined with the commonly used data processing algorithms and time-domain feature extraction method, the proposed approach improved the behavior recognition accuracy. This work will contribute to the standardized application and promotion of the noseband pressure sensors.