A lightweight CNN-based model for early warning in sow oestrus sound monitoring

The reproductive performance of sows is an important indicator for evaluating the economic efficiency and production level of pigs. In this paper, we design and propose a lightweight sow oestrus detection method based on acoustic data and deep convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms by collecting and analysing short-frequency and long-frequency sow oestrus sounds. We use visual log-mel spectrograms, which can reflect three-dimensional information, as inputs to the network model to improve the overall recognition accuracy. The improved lightweight MobileNetV3_esnet model is used to identify oestrus and nonoestrus sounds and is compared with existing algorithms. The model outperforms the other algorithms, with 97.12% precision, 97.34% recall, 97.59% F1-score, and 97.52% accuracy; the model size is 5.94 MB. Compared with traditional oestrus monitoring methods, the proposed method can more accurately boost the vocal characteristics exhibited by sows in latent oestrus, thus providing an efficient and accurate approach for use in practical applications of oestrus monitoring and early warning systems on pig farms.