Panorama Generation of Cattle Barn Images and User Evaluation

Abstract

Dairy farmers need to reduce labor because of the shortage of human resources due to the declining birth rate and the increasing scale of barns. One way to reduce the labor required for watching cows is to install cameras in the barn and monitor them. However, the multi-screen display is not necessarily efficient due to image distortion and overlapping areas. In this study, we propose a method to generate seamless panoramic images of dairy cows from camera images with less overlap and evaluate its effectiveness through user tests. The proposed method generates panoramas based on the following main ideas. That is to extract the individual regions of the dairy cows and match cows between neighboring cameras, and then blend camera images with weights considering the distance from the camera center and the regions of the cows to generate a panorama.