Tracking floor eggs with machine vision in cage-free hen houses

Tracking floor eggs with machine vision in cage-free hen houses

Blog Article

ABSTRACT: Some of the major restaurants and grocery chains in the United States have pledged to buy cage-free (CF) eggs only by 2025 or 2030.While CF house allows hens to perform more natural behaviors (e.g., dust bathing, perching, and Bosch Serie 4 DWK095G60B 90 cm Angled Chimney Cooker Hood - Black - C Rated foraging on the litter floor), a particular challenge is floor eggs (i.

e., mislaid eggs on litter floor).Floor eggs have high chances of contamination.The manual collection of eggs is laborious and time-consuming.

Therefore, precision poultry farming technology is necessary to detect floor eggs.In this study, 3 new deep learning models, that is, YOLOv5s-egg, YOLOv5x-egg, and YOLOv7-egg networks, were developed, trained, and compared in tracking floor eggs in 4 research cage-free laying hen facilities.Models were verified to detect eggs by using images collected in 2 different commercial houses.Results indicate that the YOLOv5s-egg model detected floor eggs with GENTLE FACE CLEANSER a precision of 87.

9%, recall of 86.8%, and mean average precision (mAP) of 90.9%; the YOLOv5x-egg model detected the floor eggs with a precision of 90%, recall of 87.9%, and mAP of 92.

1%; and the YOLOv7-egg model detected the eggs with a precision of 89.5%, recall of 85.4%, and mAP of 88%.All models performed with over 85% detection precision; however, model performance is affected by the stocking density, varying light intensity, and images occluded by equipment like drinking lines, perches, and feeders.

The YOLOv5x-egg model detected floor eggs with higher accuracy, precision, mAP, and recall than YOLOv5s-egg and YOLOv7-egg.This study provides a reference for cage-free producers that floor eggs can be monitored automatically.Future studies are guaranteed to test the system in commercial houses.