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This study introduces BMCTrack-d, a novel tracking-by-detection system designed for robust pig re-identification and tracking in challenging side-view camera settings. By utilizing unique back marks and implementing a neural network-based classifier, the system effectively addresses the difficulties of tracking rapidly moving pigs with uniform appearances, severe occlusions, and low resolution. The results show that BMCTrack-d significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a 9.11% improvement in higher-order tracking accuracy over the best baseline, highlighting its potential for individual-level monitoring in agricultural settings.
Back mark-based tracking boosts individual pig monitoring accuracy by over 9% in challenging environments where traditional methods fail.
Automated pig monitoring is essential for assessing their health, behaviour, and welfare. To date, most pig monitoring solutions operate on the group-level, because individual-level monitoring requires reliable long-term identification and tracking of each animal. For domesticated pigs this remains challenging because pigs of the same breed often have highly uniform appearances. Moreover, research on pig monitoring is almost exclusively reported in top-down view camera settings, which considerably ease tracking, but are not always an option in practice. In this work, BMCTrack-d is presented, a novel tracking-by-detection approach that leverages unique back marks to enable robust pig re-identification and tracking in a challenging side-view camera setting, afflicted by rapidly moving pigs, severe occlusions and low resolution. The method first predicts the detected pigs'identities using a neural network-based back mark classifier. To improve re-identification reliability over time, two dedicated post-processing stages are introduced: a temporal prediction consistency check, which validates the identity assignments against the recent prediction history, and deduplication, which resolves conflicting identity assignments in each time step. By explicitly prioritising accurate, appearance-based re-identification over continuous tracking, the proposed approach addresses a key limitation of existing trackers for individual-level monitoring scenarios. On a demanding test set BMCTrack-d outperforms two strong baselines, BoT-SORT-ReID and TrackTrack-ReID, by 9.11% and 1.03%, respectively, in higher-order tracking accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of back mark-based re-identification and tracking for robust individual-level pig monitoring in challenging settings.
