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The aim of this study was to identify the factors that affect the system performance of a threedimensional based vision system for automatic monitoring of dairy cow locomotion implemented on a commercial dairy farm. Data were gathered from a Belgian commercial dairy farm with a 40-stand rotary milking parlour. This resulted in forced cow traffic twice a day when all Holstein cows passed through an alley on their return to the pen. The video recording system with a 3D depth camera, positioned in top-down perspective, was installed in this alley. The entire monitoring process, including video recording, filtering and analysis and cow identification, was automated. System performance was defined as the number of analysed videos per session. To investigate how many video recordings could be used for monitoring dairy cow locomotion, videos were captured during 566 consecutive milking sessions. For each session, 224±10 cows were identified on average by the RFID-antenna, and 197±17 videos were recorded (88.0±6.2%) by the camera. After linking the cow identification to the recorded videos, 178±14 cow videos (79.5±5.7%) were available for analysis. After all video processing, an average of 110±24 recorded cow videos (49.3±11.0%) per session was used for analysis. The number of analysed videos per cow per week was individually variable. Cow traffic in the alley where the recordings were made had a big influence on the performance of the system. Heavy cow traffic reduced the number of recordings and the number of identified cows in each video, and more videos were filtered out due to incorrect cow segmentation in the videos.

A first ‘Glossary and Basic Definitions’ report has been prepared within the framework of Working Group ‘Animal Housing in Hot Climate’ established under CIGR Technical Section II. It aims at setting-up uniformity in terms associated with Animal Housing, serve as a focal point for the development of useful new terms and definitions and become a useful tool for all those involved in the subject. It includes terms from Engineering, Thermal Biology and Environmental Physiology and can eventually become a background document for opening-up further discussions on the meaning of various terms used in ‘Animal Housing’

The possibilities to use the dairy cows' body weight (BW) and its changes for diagnostic and management purposes were studied. BW data of dairy cows were obtained during the day from visiting computer-controlled feeding stations. These data were analyzed on a daily and weekly basis in relation to other performance data that were also recorded on a daily basis. The analysis showed that BW, being sensitive to dry matter intake (DMI), responds to reproductive and clinical events by detectable changes. Analyzing BW data in relation to those on milk yield (MY), allow to characterize physiological stages during lactation that can be of help in making management decisions. Possibilities to build models that use daily BW and MY data to estimate DMI, and significant physiological stages are presented and discussed in respect to their feasibility as decision-making aids.