Promote computer vision applications in pig farming scenarios: High-quality dataset, fundamental models, and comparable performance

Computer vision is widely recognized as an influential technology in the field of precision management of animals. Emerging studies have demonstrated the potential to improve pig health and welfare through animal surveillance systems and computer vision (CV) algorithms. However, the lack of benchmark datasets and robust fundamental algorithms restrict CV applications for the commercial use. This study aims to bridge the gap between technology development and commercial applications in pig farming scenarios by introducing a general-purpose dataset (PigLife), comparing benchmark performances of foundational CV algorithms and model development workflows. The PigLife dataset contains video clips and images (38 short video clips, 2K image frames, 22K pig instances) across most pig production phases in a typical commercial pig farm: Breeding and Gestation, Farrow to Wean, Weaning & Nursery, and Growth to Finish. Three detection algorithms (Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, TridentNet) and three segmentation algorithms (Mask R-CNN, MViTv2, PointRend) were trained on the PigLife dataset from scratch. Fine-tuning of pre-trained models (YOLO8-m, Faster-RCNN-r50) and no-training from zero-shot models (CLIP-SAM, Grouddino-HQSAM) were also evaluated to suggest faster CV development workflows for commercial applications in pig farming. This study emphasizes the necessity of a benchmark dataset for evaluating the robustness of algorithms and identifying the remaining difficulties and challenges across various algorithms. Furthermore, developing CV models from pre-trained algorithms or zero-shot models showed better performance and a faster process, which could reduce barriers when developing high-performance CV products in pig production industry.