Comparison of data analytics strategies in computer vision systems to predict pig body composition traits from 3D images.

Computer vision systems (CVS) have been shown to be a powerful tool for the measurement of live pig body weight (BW) with no animal stress. With advances in precision farming, it is now possible to evaluate the growth performance of individual pigs more accurately. However, important traits such as muscle and fat deposition can still be evaluated only via ultrasound, computed tomography, or dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry. Therefore, the objectives of this study were: 1) to develop a CVS for prediction of live BW, muscle depth (MD), and back fat (BF) from top view 3D images of finishing pigs and 2) to compare the predictive ability of different approaches, such as traditional multiple linear regression, partial least squares, and machine learning techniques, including elastic networks, artificial neural networks, and deep learning (DL). A dataset containing over 12,000 images from 557 finishing pigs (average BW of 120 ± 12 kg) was split into training and testing sets using a 5-fold cross-validation (CV) technique so that 80% and 20% of the dataset were used for training and testing in each fold. Several image features, such as volume, area, length, widths, heights, polar image descriptors, and polar Fourier transforms, were extracted from the images and used as predictor variables in the different approaches evaluated. In addition, DL image encoders that take raw 3D images as input were also tested. This latter method achieved the best overall performance, with the lowest mean absolute scaled error (MASE) and root mean square error for all traits, and the highest predictive squared correlation (R2). The median predicted MASE achieved by this method was 2.69, 5.02, and 13.56, and R2 of 0.86, 0.50, and 0.45, for BW, MD, and BF, respectively. In conclusion, it was demonstrated that it is possible to successfully predict BW, MD, and BF via CVS on a fully automated setting using 3D images collected in farm conditions. Moreover, DL algorithms simplified and optimized the data analytics workflow, with raw 3D images used as direct inputs, without requiring prior image processing.