{"id":7307,"date":"2025-08-27T11:23:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T10:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/?p=7307"},"modified":"2025-09-30T14:47:43","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T13:47:43","slug":"uwe-bristol-win-funding-to-use-deep-learning-to-create-a-holistic-assessment-of-animal-welfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/uwe-bristol-win-funding-to-use-deep-learning-to-create-a-holistic-assessment-of-animal-welfare\/","title":{"rendered":"UWE Bristol win funding to use Deep Learning to create a Holistic Assessment of Animal Welfare\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Centre for Machine Vision (CMV) at UWE Bristol have recently won funding to investigate towards a Holistic Assessment of Animal Welfare using Emotion and Deep Learning, building on prior work from CMV.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The project aims to develop technology for automated assessment of animal emotional wellbeing through the interpretation of body language, informed by work in human activity and emotion recognition using AI. Body posture and movement, which together characterise a wider body language, manifest as varying body shapes\/poses and movements. The team will utilise human eye tracking to identify holistic spatial temporal animal features linked to perceived animal emotional states, then apply this knowledge via a novel form of supervised machine learning.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The project comprises of five partners including <a href=\"https:\/\/boku.ac.at\/\">BOKU University<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sruc.ac.uk\/\">Scotland\u2019s Rural College<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ucd.ie\/\">University College Dublin<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/lnu.se\/\">Linnaeus University<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uwe.ac.uk\/\">UWE Bristol<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The call was run by the <a href=\"https:\/\/eupahw.ptj.de\/call1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">European Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare<\/a> with each partner funded by their national funder, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gov.uk\/government\/organisations\/department-for-environment-food-rural-affairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">DEFRA<\/a> in UWE Bristol\u2019s case.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The total grant is \u20ac1,459,800, with \u20ac492,000 allocated to CMV\/UWE. There has also been a spinout <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ukri.org\/councils\/innovate-uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InnovateUK<\/a> project, \u201cPig Health Station\u201d aimed at realising a commercial product, arising from the work.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The interdisciplinary team will explore computer vision-based machine learning techniques to train machine models with numerous examples of pig body language corresponding to different animal emotional states (ground truth), such as positive emotions associated with reward or negative emotions caused by unfamiliar environments. With extensive examples including structured treatments and environments to create a spectrum of emotional experiences, they aim to correlate specific animal stances and movements with given emotions and levels of arousal.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Through a system of detected trends and alerts, AI enabled automation could offer a powerful means to identify animals needing follow-up interventions in a timely manner, ensuring animal wellbeing, reducing production costs (e.g. treatments, morbidity) and antimicrobial usage (e.g. fewer blanket treatments).&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The project will be led by Associate Professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning <a href=\"https:\/\/people.uwe.ac.uk\/Person\/WenhaoZhang\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dr Wenhao Zhang<\/a>, Lecturer in Robotics and Machine Vision <a href=\"https:\/\/people.uwe.ac.uk\/Person\/DisiChen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dr Disi Chen<\/a> and Professor of Machine Vision <a href=\"https:\/\/people.uwe.ac.uk\/Person\/MelvynSmith\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Professor Melvyn Smith<\/a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Centre for Machine Vision (CMV) at UWE Bristol have recently won funding to investigate towards a Holistic Assessment of Animal Welfare using Emotion and Deep Learning, building on prior work from CMV.&nbsp;&nbsp; The project aims to develop technology for automated assessment of animal emotional wellbeing through the interpretation of body language, informed by work &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/uwe-bristol-win-funding-to-use-deep-learning-to-create-a-holistic-assessment-of-animal-welfare\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;UWE Bristol win funding to use Deep Learning to create a Holistic Assessment of Animal Welfare\u00a0\u00a0&#8220;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":7308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1481,238,636,1480,42,62,75,226],"class_list":["post-7307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uwe-bristol-research","tag-animal-welfare","tag-centre-for-machine-vision","tag-cmv","tag-deep-learning","tag-innovation","tag-research","tag-uwe-bristol","tag-uwe-bristol-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7309,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7307\/revisions\/7309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/research-external-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}