Automated infrared based health monitoring system for veterinary application

Within the interdisciplinary R&D project VIONA a novel hard- and software system was developed to investigate the potential of an automatic infrared (IR) based health monitoring. The system developments and the comprehensive practical tests were focussed on the veterinary application dairy cows. Special attention was paid to the rough practical conditions in dairy farms. The system enables a complete automation of the workflow from IR image acquisition to alarm list generation for the veterinary personal. The development contains the three main issues: precise IR temperature measurement under varying ambient conditions, image processing to extract accurate temperature features of anatomic structures automatically and statistical diagnosis algorithms based on individual time series of temperature features.The studies on hundreds of dairy cows showed that with advanced IR technology and data processing the IR based approach has a significant potential to detect common inflammation diseases.