PigFormer project page, arXiv preprint, poster, slides, and code are now public.
PhD Researcher · Smart Sensing Lab · MSU
Mk Bashar
computer vision — precision livestock
farming — autonomous driving
Open to Fall 2026 internships
About
Applying computer vision to non-invasive animal monitoring for better welfare and production.
I am a Ph.D. student in the Smart Sensing Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, advised by Dr. Daniel Morris and Dr. Xiaoming Liu.
My research applies computer vision and deep learning to precision livestock farming. I develop non-contact sensing pipelines for swine welfare: respiratory rate estimation from RGB video, body condition scoring from ceiling-mounted depth cameras, and viewpoint-aware posture recognition. Previously, as Research Lead of the Perception Team at PoliMOVE-MSU, I built real-time perception systems for high-speed autonomous racing at the Indy Autonomous Challenge.
Before MSU, I completed my B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering at the Islamic University of Technology, Bangladesh (2023), where I worked on multiple object tracking under Dr. Md. Hasanul Kabir.
News
Two papers accepted at CV4Animal 2026.
"Students add a SpARC to their MSU Experience" — featured in MSU Mobility News.
"Student view: Achieving precision at extremely high speeds" — published in MSU Today.
"Indy Autonomous Challenge Is Giving AI a High-Speed Education" in Autoweek; first place in passing overtake competition in MSU Today.
Joined PoliMOVE-MSU as Research Lead of the Perception Team for the Indy Autonomous Challenge.
Started my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, joining the Smart Sensing Lab.
Selected Publications
Google Scholar →What's Under the Skin? Estimating Swine Body Condition
CV4Animal Workshop @ CVPR 2026
Sow body condition is an important indicator for growers because it affects lactation performance and piglet survival, but common production measures such as visual scoring and calipers correlate poorly with underlying tissue composition. PigFormer is an end-to-end two-stage system that takes raw depth frames from a ceiling-mounted RGB-D camera and predicts subcutaneous backfat thickness, loin muscle depth, and total tissue thickness at the last rib. A geometric front-end standardizes depth into height maps, and a Slice Attention Encoder models cross-sectional slices along the dorsal surface. On a multi-site dataset of 319 sow and gilt instances (6,705 frames) from two facilities, PigFormer achieves 2.43 mm backfat MAE and 3.87 mm overall MAE.
@inproceedings{bashar2026pigformer,
title={What's Under the Skin? Estimating Swine Body Condition},
author={Bashar, Mk and Bhatti, Kuljit and Rohrer, Gary and Benjamin, Madonna and Brown-Brandl, Tami and Morris, Daniel},
booktitle={CV4Animals Workshop, IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
year={2026},
eprint={2606.05611},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV}
}
Camera Viewpoint-Aware Pig Posture and Benchmark Dataset
CV4Animal Workshop @ CVPR 2026
Animal posture is a key indicator of health, behavior, and welfare in precision livestock farming. However, manual posture monitoring in large-scale swine production systems is labor-intensive, costly, and often impractical. While recent computer vision approaches have shown promise for automated pig posture recognition, they are typically trained on limited or homogeneous camera viewpoints, leading to poor performance on novel datasets. In this work, a multi-view pig posture benchmark dataset with five posture classes and per-instance camera viewpoint angle information is introduced. Then, a viewpoint-aware posture recognition framework that integrates geometric context into deep visual representations and incorporates camera domain-invariant learning via an adversarial layer is designed. The proposed viewpoint-aware approach enables the method to better generalize to unseen viewpoints, achieving a +2% macro F1-score gain over the baseline and reaching 86.13%.
Camera-Based Respiratory Rate Estimation of Naturally Sleeping Pigs
American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers Annual International Meeting, 2026
We present a camera-based method for estimating the respiratory rate of naturally sleeping pigs from video. Our pipeline leverages dense point tracking with CoTracker to capture subtle belly motion, followed by Butterworth bandpass filtering and correlation-based trajectory grouping to isolate breathing signals. The trajectories are analyzed using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract the dominant respiratory frequency. We evaluate the method on a dataset of 55 nighttime video samples captured of group-housed pigs, achieving a mean absolute error of 1.48 breaths per minute. Compared to an intensity-based baseline, our approach shows significantly higher accuracy and robustness under low-light, cluttered farm conditions. Ablation studies further demonstrate the contribution of each component and the impact of query region size. This work offers a non-invasive solution for automated respiratory monitoring in livestock environments.
In Pursuit of Many: A Review of Modern Multiple Object Tracking Systems
arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.04796, 2022
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is a core capability in modern computer vision, essential to autonomous driving, surveillance, sports analytics, robotics, and biomedical imaging. Persistent identity assignment across frames remains challenging in real scenes because of occlusion, dense crowds, appearance ambiguity, scale variation, camera motion, and identity switching. In this survey we synthesize recent progress by organizing methods around the problems they target and the paradigms they adopt. We cover the historical progression from tracking-by-detection to hybrid and end-to-end designs, and we summarize major architectural directions including transformer-based trackers, generative/diffusion formulations, state-space predictors, Siamese and graph-based models, and the growing impact of foundation models for detection and representation. We review benchmark trends that motivate method design, documenting the shift from saturated pedestrian benchmarks to challenge-driven and domain-specific datasets and we analyze evaluation practice by comparing classic and newer motion- and safety-centric metrics. Finally, we connect algorithmic trends to practical deployment constraints and outline emerging directions, foundation-model integration, open-vocabulary and multimodal tracking, unified evaluation, and domain-adaptive methods, that we believe will shape MOT research and real-world adoption.
@article{bashar2022pursuit,
title={In Pursuit of Many: A Review of Modern Multiple Object Tracking Systems},
author={Bashar, Mk and Islam, Samia and Hussain, Kashifa Kawaakib and Hasan, Md. Bakhtiar and Rahman, A. B. M. Ashikur and Kabir, Md. Hasanul},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.04796},
year={2022}
}
Let's connect.
Open to research collaborations, summer internship opportunities, and conversations about computer vision for animal welfare.