3D SCANNING OF LIVE PIGS SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION IN BODY MEASUREMENTS

Abstract

The shape of a live pig is an important indicator of its health and value, whether for breeding or for carcass quality. This paper implements a prototype system for live single pig body surface 3d scanning based on two consumer depth cameras, utilizing the 3d point clouds data. These cameras are calibrated in advance to have a common coordinate system. The live 3D point clouds stream of moving single pig is obtained by two Xtion Pro Live sensors from different viewpoints simultaneously. A novel detection method is proposed and applied to automatically detect the frames containing pigs with the correct posture from the point clouds stream, according to the geometric characteristics of pig’s shape. The proposed method is incorporated in a hybrid scheme, that serves as the preprocessing step in a body measurements framework for pigs. Experimental results show the portability of our scanning system and effectiveness of our detection method. Furthermore, an updated this point cloud preprocessing software for livestock body measurements can be downloaded freely from https://github.com/LiveStockShapeAnalysis to livestock industry, research community and can be used for monitoring livestock growth status.