Distortion Correction and Stitching of Overlapping Cattle Barn Images

Abstract

With the increase of the scale of dairy firms and the popularity of free-stall barns, individual management of dairy cows has been getting more difficult. For efficient management, there is a method of installing wide-angle cameras on the ceiling; however, it makes difficult to grasp the positions of the dairy cows in the barn as the cameras increases. In this study, we aim to create a panoramic image that satisfies the following requirements: the dairy cows must not be cropped, duplicated or missing, and the stitches between the images must not be noticeable. We propose a method that extracts the individual regions of the dairy cows and synthesizes them on the underlying panorama image. We conduct a user evaluation experiment and compare the proposed method with multi-screen and simple composite images.