Nondestructive estimation method of live chicken leg weight based on deep learning.

Journal: Poultry science
PMID:

Abstract

In the broiler-breeding industry, phenotype determination is critical. Leg weight is a fundamental indicator for breeding, and noninvasive testing technology can reduce damage to animals. This study proposes a broiler leg weight estimation system comprising a weight-estimation model and computed tomography (CT) acquisition equipment. The weight-estimation model can automatically process the scan results of live broiler chickens from the CT acquisition equipment. The weight-estimation model comprises an improved you-only-look-once (YOLOv5) segmentation algorithm and a random forest fitting network. The segmentation head was introduced into the YOLOv5 network, combined with a multiscale attention mechanism and an atrous spatial pyramid pooling architecture, and a new network model, YOLO- measuring chicken leg weight (YOLO-MCLW), was proposed to improve segmentation efficiency and accuracy. Morphological parameters were extracted from the obtained mask image, and a random forest network was used for fitting. The experiments show that the system exhibited an average absolute error of 7.27 g and an average percentage error of 4.82% in tests on 50 individual legs of 25 broiler chickens. The prediction R of broiler chicken legs can reaches 88.98%, the segmentation intersection over union result reaches 95.45%, and 37.04 images are processed per second. This system provides technical support for the part determination of broiler chickens in commercial breeding.

Authors

  • Shulin Sun
    Department of Urology, Peking University Third Hospital, Peking University Health Science Center, Beijing, China.
  • Lei Wei
    MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Bioinformatics Division of BNRIST, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
  • Zeqiu Chen
    College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China.
  • Yinqian Chai
    College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China.
  • Shufan Wang
    College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China.
  • Ruizhi Sun
    College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China; Scientific Research Base for Integrated Technologies of Precision Agriculture (Animal Husbandry), the Ministry of Agriculture, Beijing 100083, China. Electronic address: sunruizhi@cau.edu.cn.