A pipeline technology for a new livestock industry: The PigLife Dataset
The livestock industry is changing quickly. Pig populations are increasing, farmers are decreasing, and tools are needed to address the widening gap.
“If you think of [PigLife] as a pipeline technology, we identified very early some of those barriers to technology development,” says Angela Green-Miller, the Labor Optimization for Livestock Co-Lead for AIFARMS and Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We need folks who work in early technology achieving solutions to those barriers before we can get to a tool that would go out to a farm.”
The lack of benchmark datasets and robust fundamental algorithms has hindered widespread commercial applications. Now, researchers everywhere have access to one of the most complete pig data sets there is. Ideally, the data would be used in applications such as computer vision— a method of affordable, non-invasive, and precise livestock monitoring of an individual animal’s entire life; an entire PigLife.
“The goal isn’t that we’re going to have computer vision fixing the problems; you still need people in the barn,” says Angela Green-Miller. “But there’s only so many hours in a day…having tools that can help those people know where to go, and what problems they’re looking for, would be a big pivot for the industry.”