HSDNet: a poultry farming model based on few-shot semantic segmentation addressing non-smooth and unbalanced convergence

Abstract

Poultry farming is an indispensable part of global agriculture, playing a crucial role in food safety and economic development. Managing and preventing diseases is a vital task in the poultry industry, where semantic segmentation technology can significantly enhance the efficiency of traditional manual monitoring methods. Furthermore, traditional semantic segmentation has achieved excellent results on extensively manually annotated datasets, facilitating real-time monitoring of poultry. Nonetheless, the model encounters limitations when exposed to new environments, diverse breeding varieties, or varying growth stages within the same species, necessitating extensive data retraining. Overreliance on large datasets results in higher costs for manual annotations and deployment delays, thus hindering practical applicability. To address this issue, our study introduces HSDNet, an innovative semantic segmentation model based on few-shot learning, for monitoring poultry farms. The HSDNet model adeptly adjusts to new settings or species with a single image input while maintaining substantial accuracy. In the specific context of poultry breeding, characterized by small congregating animals and the inherent complexities of agricultural environments, issues of non-smooth losses arise, potentially compromising accuracy. HSDNet incorporates a Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) strategy to counteract these challenges. Furthermore, by considering the effects of imbalanced loss on convergence, HSDNet mitigates the overfitting issue induced by few-shot learning. Empirical findings underscore HSDNet’s proficiency in poultry breeding settings, exhibiting a significant 72.89% semantic segmentation accuracy on single images, which is higher than SOTA’s 68.85%.