Bio-acoustic: A non-invasive and effective sensing technique in monitoring of dairy buffaloes

Abstract

The present study was performed to observe the significant effect of individuality of dairy buffaloes on the acoustic features of their vocal signals. The mean call duration, pitch, 1st formant, periodicity and degree of voice breaks of adult lactating Murrah buffaloes were observed to be 2.15±0.05 s, 143.48 ± 2.51 Hz, 900.11 ± 4.21 Hz, 95.31% (183.95 periodic pulses out of 192.99 pulses) and 20.78 ± 0.89 % respectively. Analysis of bioacoustics features extracted from 300 voice samples of 10 adult lactating Murrah buffaloes revealed that differences for amplitudes (minimum, maximum and mean), total energy, mean power, pitch (median, minimum, range and mean), intensities (mean, minimum and maximum), formants (F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5), bandwidths (B1, B3 and B4), number of pulse, number of period, mean period, unvoiced frames, degree of voice breaks, jitter, shimmer, mean noise to harmonic ratio (%) and mean harmonic to noise ratio (dB) were highly significant. Out of these only few acoustic features viz. formants (F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5), number of pulse, number of period, degree of voice breaks, mean noise to harmonic ratio (%) and mean harmonic to noise ratio (dB) were observed to have significant difference for each and every individual dairy buffalo, hence only these features could be selected as the best suited acoustic features for discrimination of individual Murrah buffaloes from their herd.