Chicken tracking for location mapping of lameness chickens using YOLOv8 and deep learning-based tracking algorithm

Abstract

The chicken farming industry is one of the biggest food industries that supports the achievement of food security internationally. Farmers need an independent tool that can monitor the welfare conditions of chickens in cages. Using their tools, farmers can ideally detect the condition of chickens. Lameness chickens, can be known for activity and dredging of their location in the cage. Occlusion, and background in the cage are interesting challenges. By observing behavior, image handling practices can be used to identify tainted chicks and provide an early warning of sickness in chickens. In this study, you only look once, version 8 (YOLOv8) which is a convolutional neural network (CNN) network model was chosen to perform the detection, tracking, and mapping of chicken locations. YOLOv8 was combined with various algorithm optimizers to improve training performance, such as root mean square (RMS) Prop, stochastic gradient descent (SGD), ADAM, and ADAMW. Multi-object tracking algorithms such as BOT-sort and ByteTrack are also used to improve tracking performance. Based on the results, YOLOv8 with combinations of optimizer algorithms ADAMW has the best mAP, support, precision and F1-score values compared to the others, with 0.936, 0.993, 0.990, 0.991. Meanwhile, for multi object tracking, ByteTrack is faster in inference time(s) values compared to the others, with 0.2.