The Power of Artificial Intelligence

How animal agriculture is reaping the benefits of Al.

Imagine a second set of eyes on your pregnant cows and receiving an alert, with a high degree of precision and accuracy, when a cow is about to give birth. Now imagine those eyes trained on your pregnant cows 24 hours a day, seven days a week, taking neither breaks nor being called away to perform other tasks.

That is what Nikon is developing. The company, well known for its imaging technologies, is using its expertise to produce an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system, using cameras to constantly monitor cows in individual calving pens. Employing advanced algorithms, the system can detect when a cow is about to give birth and immediately alert the farmer.

“The system constantly monitors mother cows with multiple surveillance cameras and analyzes the cow’s characteristic behaviors by processing the images with AI,” says Hirotaka Kono, section manager with Nikon. “Data is sent to the data center via the internet, and notifications are sent to producers’ and owners’ smartphones by messages and audio. AI detects the signs through machine learning, visualization of behavior trajectories, and segmentation machine learning content.”

Training AI

Kono says the biggest challenge in development was improving the ability to detect specific changes in cows’ behavior. “In the initial stages of development, the accuracy of detecting the characteristic behaviors of calving was low, resulting in many false notifications,” he acknowledges. Performance has improved, he says, by collecting a lot of data and repeating AI learning, and by creating appropriate logic when generating alarms. He adds that the latest demonstrations show 95% detection accuracy for characteristic calving behavior.

AI training began in fall 2021, and the company continues to make improvements such as increasing the number of system-analyzed behavioral patterns.