Young Broiler Feeding Kinematic Analysis as A Function of the Feed Type

Abstract

Past publications describe the various impact of feeding behavior of broilers on productivity and physiology. However, very few publications have considered the impact of biomechanics associated with the feeding process in birds. The present study aims at comparing the kinematic variables of young broiler chicks (3–4 days old; 19 specimens) while feeding them with three different feed types, such as fine mash (F1), coarse mash (F2), and crumbled feed (F3). The feeding behavior of the birds was recorded using a high-speed camera. Frames sequences of each mandibulation were selected manually and classified according to the temporal order that occurred (first, second, third, or fourth, and further). The head displacement and the maximum beak gape were automatically calculated by image analysis. The results did not indicate strong correlations between birds’ weight, beak size (length and width), and the kinematic variables of feeding. The differences between the tested feed were found mostly in the first and second mandibulations, probably explained by the higher incidence of “catch-and-throw” movements in F3 (33%) and F1 (26%) than F2 (20%). The “catch-and-throw” movements in F1 (the smallest feed particle) mostly occurred in the first mandibulation, as in F3 (the largest feed particle) also occurred in the latest mandibulations. It might be suggested that the adoption of “catch-and-throw” in the latest mandibulations increases with larger particles. The kinematic variables in the latest mandibulations (from the third one on) seem to be similar for all feed types, which represent the swallowing phase. It might be inferred that the temporal sequence of the mandibulations should be essential to describe the kinematics of a feeding scene of broiler chickens, and the first and second mandibulations are potentially the key factors for the differences accounted by the diverse feed particle sizes.

A Review on Computer Vision Technology for Monitoring Poultry Farm—Application, Hardware, and Software

“…Computer vision has been widely used in various processes of different poultry production systems. It includes automation of the house management, behavior, and welfare [11,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], disease detection [28,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47], weight measurement [27,[48][49], slaughtering process [50][51], carcass quality [52][53][54][55], and egg examination [56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. On the other hand, computer vision also popular on other livestock monitoring, such as pig [73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80], sheep or cattle …”

“…There are various types of camera that have been used in poultry farm regardless of its purposes. The particular type of imaging methods massively used in poultry farm, including visible light camera [11,[27][28][29][34][35][36][37][38][39]41,44,51], infrared [34,36], thermographic [36], depth [41,48,59], and hyperspectral camera [61][62]. While an ordinary visible-light camera captures light across three wavelength bands in the visible spectrum, including red, green, and blue (RGB), infrared, thermographic, depth and hyperspectral imaging encompasses a wide variety of spectrums that go beyond RGB.…”

“…A visible-light digital camera is a standard digital camera used for taking photos or videos in visible light [87]. It is very cost-effective solutions, particularly because they allow wide areas of the farm to be covered hence, a lower number of them would be necessary [36]. These benefits make most of researchers favored on this type of camera compared to other types of camera [11, 27-28, 30, 34-39,41,44,51].…”

“…Several studies have revealed that this type of camera is capable of capturing images for various purposes. For example, it is operated to detect the sick broilers [28,41], monitoring broiler behavior and movement [11,30,[34][35][36][37][38][39]41,44], and predict the live weight of broiler [27]. However, few major drawbacks of this camera are the lenses compatibility and resolution.…”

“…In addition, the low contrast between animals and bed as well as lack of results under low light intensity conditions make this type of camera not suitable in principle for the target application [36]. Hence, extra lighting units sometimes are needed to increase or maintain the light intensity in a poultry farm.…”