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Researchers at the ICAR-National Research Centre on Mithun, Nagaland, have built an artificial intelligence system that detects and tracks Mithun behaviour in real time in a natural farm setting.
Twelve high-definition CCTV cameras with infrared coverage across two sheds produced a dataset of 3,000 manually annotated images of four behaviours — feeding, standing, lying and mounting.
The framework pairs the YOLOv8n detection model with DeepSORT tracking, achieving mAP@0.5 of 99.5 per cent, recall of 99.6 per cent and about 31 frames per second on an NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU.
Continuous automated monitoring can flag health, comfort and nutrition changes and support oestrus and reproductive management without constant physical observation.
The study was published in Engineering Research Express, Volume 8 (2026), Article 175213, with NIT Nagaland, Nagaland University and CHRIST (Deemed to be University) as collaborators.
Using sensors, cameras and computer vision to monitor individual animals continuously, so that shifts in feeding, standing, lying or reproductive behaviour surface early health, comfort and nutrition problems that manual observation would miss, especially at night.
Simple Analogy: A fitness tracker for the herd, worn by nobody — the cameras do the watching.
India's dedicated Mithun research institute; developed the AI detection and tracking framework.
Autonomous apex body coordinating agricultural research and education in India; parent of the NRC on Mithun.
Joint authors of the study alongside ICAR-NRC on Mithun.
Raise productivity and production of meat, egg, goat milk, wool and fodder while generating employment through entrepreneurship, run by the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying.
Key: Implemented since 2014-15 and realigned from 2021-22 around entrepreneurship development in small ruminants, poultry, piggery and fodder; breed improvement; feed and fodder supply chains; and a sub-mission on innovation and extension.
Development and conservation of indigenous bovine breeds and improvement of their productivity.
Key: Launched in December 2014 and implemented by the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying; it is the flagship programme for indigenous cattle genetic improvement.
GS Paper 3 > Science and Technology > Developments and Applications in Everyday Life; Animal Rearing
General Awareness > Science and Technology and Government Institutions
Consider the following statements about the Rashtriya Gokul Mission: I. It is important for the upliftment of rural poor... II. It was initiated to promote indigenous cattle and buffalo rearing... Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Answer: Both I and II
Semi-domesticated bovine of the Northeast hills, State Animal of Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, recognised by FSSAI as a food animal from 1 September 2023.
A tracking algorithm that assigns persistent identities to detected objects across video frames, paired here with the YOLOv8n detector.
Mean average precision at an intersection-over-union threshold of 0.5, the standard accuracy measure for object detection models; 99.5 per cent here.