YOLO-Based Model for Automatic Detection of Broiler Pathological Phenomena through Visual and Thermal Images in Intensive Poultry Houses

The increasing broiler demand due to overpopulation and meat imports presents challenges in poultry farming, including management, disease control, and chicken observation in varying light conditions. To address these issues, the development of AI-based management processes is crucial, especially considering the need for detecting pathological phenomena in intensive rearing. In this study, a dataset consisting of visual and thermal images was created to capture pathological phenomena in broilers. The dataset contains 10,000 images with 50,000 annotations labeled as lethargic chickens, slipped tendons, diseased eyes, stressed (beaks open), pendulous crop, and healthy broiler. Three versions of the YOLO-based algorithm (v8, v7, and v5) were assessed, utilizing augmented thermal and visual image datasets with various augmentation methods. The aim was to develop thermal- and visual-based models for detecting broilers in complex environments, and secondarily, to classify pathological phenomena under challenging lighting conditions. After training on acknowledged pathological phenomena, the thermal YOLOv8-based model demonstrated exceptional performance, achieving the highest accuracy in object detection (mAP50 of 0.988) and classification (F1 score of 0.972). This outstanding performance makes it a reliable tool for both broiler detection and pathological phenomena classification, attributed to the use of comprehensive datasets during training and development, enabling accurate and efficient detection even in complex environmental conditions. By employing both visual- and thermal-based models for monitoring, farmers can obtain results from both thermal and visual viewpoints, ultimately enhancing the overall reliability of the monitoring process.