Thursday, April 06, 2006

PigVision images to be reanalysed

Morten Birkholm, who participated in the PigVision project as an employee at Videometer, is currently participating in a course at IMM at the Danish Technical University. As a project in that course he wants to reanalyse the pig images from the experimental setup at Grønhøj. Originally the images were analysed using Active Shape Models (ASM), and now he wants to apply Active Appearence Modelling (AAM) to the images. I have sent him the approximately 1000 images with corresponding weights, and I look forward to see the results in the beginning of June. If you visit Tim Cootes' home page you can find more information about the techniques. By the way, tomorrow I am censor on master thesis about delivery strategies for slaughter pigs. Another off-spring of the PigVision project.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

New version of Bayes Net home pages

Two of my home pages concerning bayesian networks have been relocated/redesigned. The first is examples of use of bayesian network in animal production, and the second is the web version (in Danish) of the article in Naturens Verden: Bedre Beslutninger med Bayesianske Netværk, which I coauthored with Steffen L. Lauritzen.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Paper accepted

Our paper has been accepted about the use of heated floor in farrowing pen from the project about loose housing of farrowing sows. The first version was returned with a request for minor revisions, which we have made. The formal citation is:

L. J. Pedersen, Malmkvist, J. and Jørgensen, E. (2006) The use of a heated floor area by sows and piglets in farrowing pens. Applied Animal Behaviour Science (accepted)

I had to make some recalculations concerning the diurnal rythm in behaviour when farrowing approaches. It was a bit tricky because we considered time on two different scales, the chronological scale (time of day) and the time related to time until/since birth of first pig.