Journal of Animal Science and Technology
Korean Society of Animal Science and Technology
Article

Estimating vegetation index for outdoor free-range pig production using YOLO

Sang-Hyon OH1, Hee-Mun Park2, Jin-Hyun Park2,*
1Division of Animal Science, College of Agriculture and Life Science, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju 52725, Korea.
2School of Mechatronics Engineering, Engineering College of Convergence Technology, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju 52725, Korea.
*Corresponding Author: Jin-Hyun Park, School of Mechatronics Engineering, Engineering College of Convergence Technology, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju 52725, Korea, Republic of. E-mail: uabut@gnu.ac.kr.

© Copyright 2023 Korean Society of Animal Science and Technology. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Apr 01, 2023; Revised: Apr 30, 2023; Accepted: May 02, 2023

Published Online: May 08, 2023

Abstract

The objective of this study was to quantitatively estimate the level of grazing area damage in outdoor free-range pig production using a UAV with an RGB image sensor. Ten corn field images were captured by a UAV over approximately two weeks, during which gestating sows were allowed to graze freely on the corn field measuring 100×50 m<sup>2</sup>. The images were corrected to a bird's-eye view, and then divided into 32 segments and sequentially inputted into the YOLOv4 detector to detect the corn images according to their condition. The 43 raw training images selected randomly out of 320 segmented images were flipped to create 86 images, and then these images were further augmented by rotating them in 5-degree increments to create a total of 6,192 images. The increased 6192 images are further augmented by applying three random color transformations to each image, resulting in 24,768 datasets. The occupancy rate of corn in the field was estimated efficiently using YOLO. As of the first day of observation (day 2), it was evident that almost all the corn had disappeared by the ninth day. When grazing 20 sows in a 50×100 m<sup>2</sup> cornfield (250 m<sup>2</sup>/sow), it appears that the animals should be rotated to other grazing areas to protect the cover crop after at least five days. In agricultural technology, most of the research using machine and deep learning is related to the detection of fruits and pests, and research on other application fields is needed. In addition, large-scale image data collected by experts in the field are required as training data to apply deep learning. If the data required for deep learning is insufficient, a large number of data augmentation is required.

Keywords: outdoor; pig; production; vegetation index; image analysis