Mislaying behavior detection in cage-free hens with deep learning technologies

Floor egg-laying behavior (FELB) is one of the most concerning issues in commercial cage-free (CF) houses because floor eggs (i.e., mislaid eggs on the floor) result in high labor costs and food safety concerns. Farms with poor management may have up to 10% of daily floor eggs. Therefore, it is critical to improving floor eggs management. Detecting FELB timely and identifying the reason behind its cause may address the issue. The primary objectives of this research were to develop and test a new deep-learning model to detect FELB and evaluate the model's performance in 4 identical research CF houses (200 Hy-Line W-36 hens per house), where perches and litter floor were provided to mimic commercial tiered aviary system. Five different YOLOv5 models (i.e., YOLOv5n, YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l, and YOLOv5x) were trained and compared. According to a dataset of 5400 images (i.e., 3780 for training, 1080 for validation, and 540 for testing), YOLOv5m-FELB and YOLOv5x-FELB models were tested with higher precision (99.9%), recall (99.2%), mAP@0.50 (99.6%), and F1-score (99.6%) than others. However, the YOLOv5m-NFELB model has lower recall than other YOLOv5-NFELB models, although it was tested with higher precision. Similarly, the speed of data processing (4%–45% FPS), and training time (3%–148%) were higher in the YOLOv5s model while requiring less GPU (1.8–4.8 times) than in other models. Furthermore, the camera height of 0.5 m and clean camera outperform compared to 3 m height and dusty camera. Thus, the newly developed and trained YOLOv5s model will be further innovated. Future studies will be conducted to verify the performance of the model in commercial CF houses to detect FELB.