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According to Professor Yaosheng Chen, the founder of Yingzi, the company has been exploring for the last five years which opportunities could be created after applying Artificial Intelligence to pig farming. The pig face recognition project was officially started in 2017 and by the official launch day, there were 1 692 farms country-wide participating in the experience, and 168 821 pigs had been scanned. With a percentage of recognition that could be as high as 98 per cent, the industry is very positive on this technology.
The system is mainly applied for white pigs weighing more than 100 kilograms, and the system provides its highest recognition rate on sows.
What are the main challenge that Yingzi has faced developing the Pig Face Recognition Thecnology?
- Large number of litter mates sharing appearance traits.
- Fast growth rate makes appearance to quickly change.
- Pigs rarely face the lens making it difficult to collect and control data.
- Due to the living habits of the pigs, their faces are generally subject to environmental pollution that can interfere in the identification.
Pig Face Recognition is one of the achievement of Yingzi’s efforts over the years and it show us a lot of possibilities for farming. “The product has been redesigned and improved in all aspects including structure designing, frame construction, modelling and arithmetic and could basically response to the farming needs”, said Professor Chen.
The objective is to improve recognition quality and optimize customer experience:
- Further improve the recognition accuracy and efficiency.
- Further expand the suitability for different breeds and body weight range of the pigs.
- Further strengthen human-computer interaction effect.
Introduce commercial application of pig face recognition as soon as possible:
- To interact with applications related to Genetics, Nutrition, Health, Environmental Control and Production Management.
- Open to interact with pig identity applications globally.
- To cooperate with global pig companies using pig face recognition technology.
How does the pig face recognition system work?
At the launch event, there was a real time demonstration of the technology through an online connection to a pig farm. A technician from Yingzi called Danxi pig farm and made a life demo on pig face recognition technology.
The system could successfully scan the pig face again, identify the individual animal and the technician from Yingzi showed all the info associated to the individual animal that was already uploaded in the system.
Professor Chen shared the vision and mission of Yingzi on the launch event
The traditional pig industry is suffering many challenges. Nowadays, environment constrains are increasing; people are losing interest to raise pigs; and some resources are not available any more… Pig farming is now becoming more and more modern due to different challenges. Different factors are playing an important role. There are more vegetarians around the world; artificial meat industry is gradually maturing; Animal welfare is having an increasing relevance.
With all those circumstances, what can the industry do to solve the problem of nutrition, disease, environment and management? What can be done with the assistance of AI technology in reducing pollution and disease? Or to improve efficiency and increase the economic return, improving customers’ satisfaction? The new technologies have answers with the help of digitization, online work, datamation and the model of AI + Cooperation. All this elements will lead to a new way of thinking.
March 22, 2018 - pig333.cn
