Real-time behavior recognition of animal: an IoT-based system design using acceleration data

By analyzing large amounts of animal behavior data, humans can assess cattle’s condition. It leads to research and development a field using accelerometers and machine learning algorithms to ‘study’ behavior from acceleration data. It is challenging to analyze animal behavior due to the activity complexity. For example, acceleration data of some cow behaviors (e.g., feeding and standing) are similar if these behaviors contain similar gestures. In practical, real-time applications even bring more challenging since it is necessary to minimize a data window for behavior consideration. Using short data window often reduces the performance of classification algorithms. This study proposes a new solution for the mentioned challenges by combining neck-mounted and leg-mounted accelerometers, then using the vector of the dynamic body acceleration (VeDBA) and Mean features of synchronized acceleration data for the Decision Tree algorithm. The proposed method is demonstrated that performs well (0.94 accuracy, 0.91 sensitivity, 0.90 positive predictive value) within a low computational complexity algorithm and short data window (3-second data window, at the rate of one sample per second). It is particularly suited for the case of a real-time IoT-based system.