Abstract
Surface temperature variation in a broiler’s head can be used as an indicator of its health status. Surface temperatures in the existing thermograph based animal health assessment studies were mostly obtained manually. 2185 thermal images, each of which had an individual broiler, were captured from 20 broilers. Where 15 broilers served as the experimental group, they were injected with 0.1mL of pasteurella inoculum. The rest, 5 broilers, served as the control group. An algorithm was developed to extract head surface temperature automatically from the top-view broiler thermal image. Adaptive K-means clustering and ellipse fitting were applied to locate the broiler’s head region. The maximum temperature inside the head region was extracted as the head surface temperature. The developed algorithm was tested in Matlab® (R2016a) and the testing results indicated that the head region in 92.77% of the broiler thermal images could be located correctly. The maximum error of the extracted head surface temperatures was not greater than 0.1 °C. Different trend features were observed in the smoothed head surface temperature time series of the broilers in experimental and control groups. Head surface temperature extracted by the presented algorithm lays a foundation for the development of an automatic system for febrile broiler identification.
Highlights
Body temperature is one of the most important indicators of a broiler’s health status [1]
Algorithm testing results indicated that 92.77% of the thermal images could be processed correctly, and the maximum error of the extracted head temperatures was less than 0.1 ◦ C
For the thermal images whose broiler head part was correctly located, correlation coefficient between the maximum temperatures extracted by the developed algorithm and by Smartview was 99.99%
Summary
Body temperature is one of the most important indicators of a broiler’s health status [1]. When a broiler is infected with bacteria or a virus, the autoimmune system will take effect, resulting in an obvious rise of core body temperature [2]. Sudden changes in core body temperature can be utilized to identify a sick broiler. Traditional body temperature measurement is achieved by inserting a mercury thermometer into a broiler’s rectum [3]. It could increase the probability of disease spreading between farmers and broilers
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