Sistema de aquisição de áudio para avaliação do comportamento ingestivo em animais

Abstract

Due to the importance of ruminant mammals in the context of animal production and the continuous increase in the quality and productivity requirements of livestock systems, many researches are done aiming to study monitoring techniques directed to these animals, in order to provide methods to better understand the relationship between them and their environment. The nutritional monitoring of ruminants is a branch of this study that aims to establish strategies to determine ingestive characteristics in these animals. Traditional methods of nutritional monitoring are inefficient and labor-intensive, in this context, recent works proposes electronic and automated methodologies to perform this analysis. This work uses the acoustic method as the basis for the development of a system for acquisition and classification of recurrent signals from the ruminant feeding process. The developed system was used to make sound recordings in a Jersey dairy cow and from this experiment it was identify a recognition rate of 72.45% for bites, chews and chew bites in the free grazing environment.