Camera based automation of the analysis of personalities and social structures of a herd of dairy cows using neural networks and dynamic network analysis

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The individual needs and behaviours of farm animals affect the animals’ health and productivity and should be considered in an animal-friendly husbandry. The aim of this Precision Livestock Farming project is to analyse the different personalities of conventionally group housed dairy cows and to understand, in which manner the interaction of personalities affects the herd structure. Long-term videos will be recorded and an automation of the observation of everyday behaviour (e.g. feeding, use of cow brush, used paths) as well as of the determination of social interactions between the cows is aspired. As data basis for the conventional evaluation of personalities of individual animals, well established temperament tests will be conducted concerning all cows in the analysed herd. Then relations between personality traits and everyday activities will be explained. To achieve an automated determination of behaviour and animal interactions that is independent from a human observer, software will be specifically developed. Machine Learning models (Neural Networks) will be trained using the video material and will afterwards be used to specify the animals’ activities. For the analysis of this detailed information, dynamic network analysis will be applied. Herd structures (cows correspond to nodes, interactions correspond to edges) or the use of resources will be modelled as networks. Parameters to rank the nodes and parameters regarding the complete network will be calculated to reveal relationships between personalities and herd structure. Patterns like repeating behaviours of individual animals or recurring constellations of interactions can be described by means of the gathered data (everyday activity, network analysis). An analysis of these patterns with regard to the effects of external events (e.g. changes in feeding) and to relations between personality dimensions (e.g. aggression – dominance or fear - activity) is another aim of this research project. Methods of pattern recognition will be applied to predict contemporary developments of the patterns. In this way a comparison with the actually occurred state of the social structure will enable an analysis of the effects of external events. Furthermore, to compare individual patterns of the determined parameters of the cows can supply explanatory approaches for the emergence of combinations of personality dimensions. This analysis of animal personalities is based on image processing, network analysis and pattern recognition and dealing with various types of information. It is to be expected that important findings on how the personality can be assessed outside of test situations and how personality can be an asset for management decisions and improvement of animal welfare.