Abstract
The gender ratio of free-range chickens is considered as a major animal welfare problem in commercial broiler farming. Free-range chicken producers need to identify chicken gender to estimate the economic value of their flock. However, it is challenging for farmers to estimate the gender ratio of chickens efficiently and accurately, since the environmental background is complicated and the chicken number is dynamic. Moreover, manual estimation is likely double counts or missed count and thus is inaccurate and time consuming. Hence, automated methods that can lead to results efficiently and accurately replace the identification abilities of a chicken gender expert, working in a farm environment, are beneficial to the industry. The contributions in this paper include: (1) Building the world’s first chicken gender classification database annotated manually, which comprises 800 chicken flock images captured on a farm and 1000 single chicken images separated from the flock images by an object detection network, labelled with gender information. (2) Training a rooster and hen classifier using a deep neural network and cross entropy in information theory to achieve an average accuracy of 96.85%. The evaluation of the algorithm performance indicates that the proposed automated method is practical for the gender classification of chickens on the farm environment and provides a feasible way of thinking for the estimation of the gender ratio.
Highlights
According to a communiqué [1], China’s poultry meat output in 2018 was 19.94 million tons, beef 6.44 million tons, and mutton 4.75 million tons
This paper explores the gender ratio of chickens in farms and explores a method to estimate the gender ratios of chickens automatically
In terms of processing accuracy, the source of object detection is the image collected by a single camera on the breeding environment
Summary
According to a communiqué [1], China’s poultry meat output in 2018 was 19.94 million tons, beef 6.44 million tons, and mutton 4.75 million tons. From a worldwide perspective [2], the consumption of poultry meat accounts for a large proportion. Poultry farming, especially chicken farming, is important for food supply. The informationization of the chicken industry receives more and more attention. To control the cost of raising chickens and achieve the maximum profit, maintaining a moderate size of flocks is the current best method [3]. When the ratio of roosters and hens in the flock reaches a certain proportion, the reproductive rate and growth health of the flock can reach the optimal state [4]
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