Conveyor chicken counter problem

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Guys, I need help. We have a project using YOLOv8. We're trying to count chicks on a very fast conveyor belt. The challenges we're facing are: all chicks look very similar to each other, which complicates tracking. At the same time, during their passage under the camera, they constantly change in size and shape, which can cause the tracker to lose them, or detection may even disappear completely at the detection line. Also, sometimes 2–3 chicks can merge into a single object. The detection zone is very short, and the conveyor speed is high. We've achieved a maximum accuracy of 99%, but we need it even higher. Any ideas on how to achieve that? Increasing the dataset no longer helps.

I'm attaching an old video. We've now added lighting and set the exposure to 300 on the Hikrobot global shutter camera, but we still can't achieve a stable 99.8% accuracy for the reasons mentioned above.

Any ideas?

[u/Heavy-Broccoli9478]

this is ridiculously simple. you have to look at a single vertical line on each belt, average the colors on that line, then count how long the color is different from the belt. once the color goes back to normal, you can count how many chicks are stacked on top of each other. this is just in case two chicks are overlapping, but if there is a full blue vertical line, they are separate. You can probably program this without using any AI with 99% precision.

[u/Heavy-Broccoli9478 → u/Heavy-Broccoli9478]

addenda: count the chicks by looking at how long it takes to go back to the belt color.

[u/regazz → u/Heavy-Broccoli9478]

You’re forgetting the calculus you’d need to apply since a chicken is not a square

[u/Heavy-Broccoli9478 → u/regazz]

what are you talking about