An Automatic Ear Temperature Monitoring Method for Group-Housed Pigs Adopting Infrared Thermography

The goal of this study was to develop an automated monitoring system based on infrared thermography (IRT) for the detection of group-housed pig ears temperature. The aim in the first part of the study was to recognize pigs’ ears by using neural network analysis (SwinStar-YOLO). In the second part of the study, the goal was to automatically extract the maximum and average values of the temperature in the ear region using morphological image processing and a temperature matrix. Our dataset (3600 pictures, 10,812 pig ears) was processed using 5-fold cross-validation before training the ear detection model. The model recognized pigs’ ears with a precision of 93.74% related to threshold intersection over union (IoU). Correlation analysis between manually extracted and algorithm-derived ear temperatures from 400 pig ear samples showed coefficients of determination (R2) of 0.97 for maximum and 0.88 for average values. This demonstrates that our proposed method is feasible and reliable for automatic pig ear temperature monitoring, serving as a powerful tool for early health warning.