Automatic Detection of Cage-Free Dead Hens with Deep Learning Methods

Poultry farming plays a significant role in ensuring food security and economic growth in many countries. However, various factors such as feeding management practices, environmental conditions, and diseases lead to poultry mortality (dead birds). Therefore, regular monitoring of flocks and timely veterinary assistance is crucial for maintaining poultry health, well-being, and the success of poultry farming operations. However, the current monitoring method relies on manual inspection by farm workers, which is time-consuming. Therefore, developing an automatic early mortality detection (MD) model with higher accuracy is necessary to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in poultry. This study aimed to develop, evaluate, and test the performance of YOLOv5-MD and YOLOv6-MD models in detecting poultry mortality under various cage-free (CF) housing settings, including camera height, litter condition, and feather coverage. The results demonstrated that the YOLOv5s-MD model performed exceptionally well, achieving a high mAP@0.50 score of 99.5%, a high FPS of 55.6, low GPU usage of 1.04 GB, and a fast-processing time of 0.4 h. Furthermore, this study also evaluated the models' performances under different CF housing settings, including different levels of feather coverage, litter coverage, and camera height. The YOLOv5s-MD model with 0% feathered covering achieved the best overall performance in object detection, with the highest mAP@0.50 score of 99.4% and a high precision rate of 98.4%. However, 80% litter covering resulted in higher MD. Additionally, the model achieved 100% precision and recall in detecting hens' mortality at the camera height of 0.5 m but faced challenges at greater heights such as 2 m. These findings suggest that YOLOv5s-MD can detect poultry mortality more accurately than other models, and its performance can be optimized by adjusting various CF housing settings. Therefore, the developed model can assist farmers in promptly responding to mortality events by isolating affected birds, implementing disease prevention measures, and seeking veterinary assistance, thereby helping to reduce the impact of poultry mortality on the industry, ensuring the well-being of poultry and the overall success of poultry farming operations.