Research of detection method for broiler chicken feed intake based on audio technology

Objective  To propose a method to detect feed intake based on broiler chicken feeding audio, overcome the situation that feed intake data of broiler chickens in China nowadays were mainly population feed intake measured manually and provide a strong technical support for accurately measuring broiler chicken feed intake.

Method  The feed intake audio collected by voice recorder was conducted framing, windowing, endpoint detection and other preprocessings, the effective sound fragments were picked up. Then one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM) was used to classify extracted sound fragments based on power spectral density curve differences of different sounds. The pecking number during feeding process was detected through audio technology. The relationship between pecking number and feed intake was explored, and the feed intake was calculated by their strong correlation.

Result  The pecking number of broiler chicken detected through audio technology was highly correlated with feed intake, and the determination coefficient (R²) was 0.982 5. The calculation accuracy rates of pecking number and feed intake were 94.58% and 91.37% respectively.

Conclusion  This method can be used for feed intake measurement of broiler chicken.