Automated Monitoring of Livestock Behavior Using Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave Radars

Abstract

In animal production, behavioral selection is becoming increasingly important to improvethe docility of livestock. Several behavioral traits, including motion, are experimentally recorded in orderto characterize the reactivity of animals and investigate its genetic determinism. Behavioral analysesare often time consuming because large numbers of animals have to be compared. For this reason,automatization is needed to develop high throughput data recording and efficient phenotyping. Herewe introduce a new method to monitor the position and motion of an individual sheep using a 24 GHzfrequency-modulated continuous-wave radar in a classical experimental paradigm called thearena test.The measurement method is non-invasive, does not require equipping animals with electronic tags,and offers a depth measurement resolution less than 10 cm. Parasitic echoes (or “clutters”) that couldalter the sheep backscattered signal are removed by using the singular value decomposition analysis.In order to enhance the clutters mitigation, the direction-of-arrivals of electromagnetic backscatteredsignals are derived from applying the MUltiple Signals Classification algorithm. We discuss how theproposed automatized monitoring of individual sheep could be applied to a wider range of species andexperimental contexts for animal behavior research.