Pig Back Transformer: Automatic 3D Pig Body Measurement Model

Nowadays most no contact body size measurement studies are based on point cloud segmentation method, they use a trained point cloud segmentation neural network to segment point cloud of pigs, then locate measurement points based on them. But point cloud segmentation neural network always need a larger graphics processing unit (GPU) memory, moreover, the result of the measurement key point still has room of improvement. This study aims to design a key point generating neural network to extract measurement key points from pig's point cloud. Reducing the GPU memory usage and improve the result of measurement points at the same time, improve both the efficiency and accuracy of the body size measurement.

A neural network model was proposed using improved Transformer attention mechanic called Pig Back Transformer for generating key points and back orientation points which were related to pig body dimensions. In the first part of the network, it was introduced an embedding structure for initial feature extraction and a Transformer encoder structure with edge attention which was a self-attention mechanic improved from Transformer's encoder. The embedding structure using two shared multilayer perceptron (MLP) and a distance embedding algorithm, it takes a set of points from the edge of pig back's point cloud as input and then extract information from the edge points set. In the encoder part, information about the offset distances between edge points and mass point which were their feature that extracted by the embedding structure mentioned before incorporated. Additionally, an extraction algorithm for back edge point was designed for extracting edge points to generate the input of the neural network model. In the second part of the network, it was proposed a Transformer encoder with improved self-attention called back attention. In the design of back attention, it also had an embedding structure before the encoder structure, this embedding structure extracted features from offset values, these offset values were calculated by the points which are none-edge and down sampled by farthest point sampling (FPS) to both the relative centroid point and model generated global key point from the first part that introduced before. Then these offset values were processed with max pooling with attention generated by the extracted features of the points' axis to extract more information that the original Transformer encoder couldn't extract with the same number of parameters. The output part of the model was designed to generate a set of offsets of the key points and points for back direction fitting, than add the set offset to the global key point to get points for pig body measurements. At last, it was introduced the methods for calculating body dimensions which were length, height, shoulder width, abdomen width, hip width, chest circumference and abdomen circumference using key points and back direction fitting points.

In the task of generating key points and points for back direction fitting, the improved Pig Back Transformer performed the best in the accuracy wise in the models tested with the same size of parameters, and the back orientation points generated by the model were evenly distributed which was a good preparation for a better body length calculation. A melting test for edge detection part with two attention mechanic and edge trim method both introduced above had being done, when the edge detection and the attention mechanic got cut off, the result had been highly impact, it made the model couldn't perform as well as before, when the edge trim method of preprocessing part had been cut off, there's a moderate impact on the trained model, but it made the loss of the model more inconsistence while training than before. When comparing the body measurement algorithm with human handy results, the relative error in length was 0.63%, which was an improvement compared to other models. On the other hand, the relative error of shoulder width, abdomen width and hip width had edged other models a little but there was no significant improvement so the performance of these measurement accuracy could be considered negligible, the relative error of chest circumference and abdomen circumference were a little bit behind by the other methods existed, it's because the calculate method of circumferences were not complicated enough to cover the edge case in the dataset which were those point cloud that have big holes in the bottom of abdomen and chest, it impacted the result a lot.

The improved Pig Back Transformer demonstrates higher accuracy in generating key points and is more resource-efficient, enabling the calculation of more accurate pig body measurements. And provides a new perspective for non-contact livestock body size measurements.