Discrimination of Karan Fries cow’s individuality by the mean of their vocal acoustic features

Abstract

Sound is one of the most important means of conveying information over long distances as well as in close vicinity. Utterance of animals becomes unique for them when they communicate their individuality or physiological state to the other co species partner. Present study was based on hypothesis of discrimination of individual identity through vocal signal of lactating karan fries (KF) cows. For this 25 KF cows were selected for recording of their vocal signal. Vocal call was recorded after separation of animal from their living herd in the morning hours. Acoustic features of vocalization of individual cow were extracted with the help of PRAAT acoustic analysis software. Analysis of all acoustic features extracted from 250 voice samples of 25 KF cows revealed that differences for amplitude, Total energy, pitch, intensity, formants, pulse, periods, unvoiced frames, voice breaks, jitter, shimmer, mean noise/harmonic ratio and mean harmonic/noise ratio were found highly significant (p < 0.001). Out of these only few acoustic features viz. pulse, pitch, jitter, shimmer, voice break and formants were observed to have significant (p<0.05) difference between each and every individual KF cow. Among these feature formants frequency of every individual cow had a unique pattern in the distribution of frequency contour in their vocal spectrogram. Study concluded that vocal signal of KF cow have some unique feature at individual level, by which cow identification could be made.