The main focus of our research is to develop tools for management of livestock by continuous, automated real-time, monitoring of production/reproduction, health and welfare of livestock and environmental impact. 

PLF-Hub aims to foster internal collaboration at the Vetmeduni but also with (inter)national experts in animal health, behaviour and welfare that are focused on research in PLF field. It is the foundational idea of the PLF-Hub to strengthen the internal collaboration at the Vetmeduni that should result in synergies of animal and engineering expertise necessary for development of PLF technologies.

Expertise and service

Core expertise of the PLF-Hub is engineering and algorithm development. The PLF-Hub focuses on computer vision as the main technology for real-time livestock monitoring as it has several advantages over other technologies. It allows monitoring of a group of animals in a non-invasive way by use of just one sensor. Moreover, it has the potential to monitor multiple key indicators related to welfare, health and production of livestock. Sensor technologies such as RFID or accelerometer are applied to either extend the monitoring capabilities of computer vision or to circumvent the existing limitations of this technology.

PLF-Hub supports a wide scope of activities i.e. technical assistance and coordination for integrating sensor systems provided by external companies; development of code and hardware design for embedded sensor systems using prototyping platforms e.g. Arduino, Raspberry Pi; integration and management of sensors in the existing network e.g. cameras, water flow, RFID; support in setting up virtual environments and interactive coding interfaces for algorithm development; management of labeling software; management of time series databases and visualization of time series data in dashboards; technical project planning for third party project applications.