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Camera-Based Respiratory Rate Estimation of Naturally Sleeping Pigs

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  2026 ASABE Annual International Meeting  2600527.(doi:10.13031/aim.202600527)
Authors:   Mk Bashar, Anil Bhujel, Daniel Morris
Keywords:   Animal welfare, CoTracker, Frequency analysis, Livestock monitoring, Non-contact sensing, Point tracking, Respiratory rate, Video-based monitoring

Abstract. We present a camera-based method for estimating the respiratory rate of naturally sleeping pigs from video. Our pipeline leverages dense point tracking with CoTracker to capture subtle belly motion, followed by Butterworth bandpass filtering and correlation-based trajectory grouping to isolate breathing signals. The trajectories are analyzed using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract the dominant respiratory frequency. We evaluate the method on a dataset of 55 nighttime video samples captured of group-housed pigs, achieving a mean absolute error of 1.48 breaths per minute. Compared to an intensity-based baseline, our approach shows significantly higher accuracy and robustness under low-light, cluttered farm conditions. Ablation studies further demonstrate the contribution of each component and the impact of query region size. This work offers a non-invasive solution for automated respiratory monitoring in livestock environments.

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