Detecting broiler chickens on litter floor with the YOLOv5-CBAM deep learning model

For commercial broiler production, about 20,000–30,000 birds are raised in each confined house, which has caused growing public concerns on animal welfare. Currently, daily evaluation of broiler wellbeing and growth is conducted manually, which is labor-intensive and subjectively subject to human error. Therefore, there is a need for an automatic tool to detect and analyze the behaviors of chickens and predict their welfare status. In this study, we developed a YOLOv5-CBAM-broiler model and tested its performance for detecting broilers on litter floor. The proposed model consisted of two parts: (1) basic YOLOv5 model for bird or broiler feature extraction and object detection; and (2) the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to improve the feature extraction capability of the network and the problem of missed detection of occluded targets and small targets. A complex dataset of broiler chicken images at different ages, multiple pens and scenes (fresh litter versus reused litter) was constructed to evaluate the effectiveness of the new model. In addition, the model was compared to the Faster R-CNN, SSD, YOLOv3, EfficientDet and YOLOv5 models. The results demonstrate that the precision, recall, F1 score and an mAP@0.5 of the proposed method were 97.3%, 92.3%, 94.7%, and 96.5%, which were superior to the comparison models. In addition, comparing the detection effects in different scenes, the YOLOv5-CBAM model was still better than the comparison method. Overall, the proposed YOLOv5-CBAM-broiler model can achieve real-time accurate and fast target detection and provide technical support for the management and monitoring of birds in commercial broiler houses.