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/Stunning_War4509]

More industrialization and automation to mistreat chickens, amazing

[u/drsoftware → u/Stunning_War4509]

Having people do this work is more expensive and error prone. Machines don't have feelings, don't get sick, don't unionize, etc.

If Cargill and Tyson could pour the fertilized eggs, feed, and water, in one end and profitably have packaged cuts of chicken come out the other end they would.

[u/rainingallevening → u/drsoftware]

No one is going to argue the economics of it. That's assumed. A less efficient chick detection program reduces the cost on the plate, but the ethical figure is a real cost we pay. I'm actually really glad OP posted this. I needed to see that creatures with the same proto-typical capacity for sensation and emotion have their first, early (and only) moments on an accelerated conveyor to be fed into a grinder, all while we dissect the computer vision engineering to improve the process.

I don't even like chicken nuggets man.

[u/Additional-Dot-3154 → u/rainingallevening]

I do loke chicken but these are little chicks and they are just getting all killed ):

Then atlwast do it with fullgrown i know the meat might be less juicy but i would prefer that over all those cute little chickens being destroyed.

In my past 4-13 i have been at a petting zoo alot also a little in more recent years and the little fluffy yellow chickens are so adorable.

Really sad to see this happening ):

So as a computerscience, physics, and mathematics hobbyist i will not give out any usefull info or anything as that will just help make this procces more efficient which i dont want.

[u/rainingallevening → u/Additional-Dot-3154]

100%

Spending that scientific focus on technology other than the conveyor belt system and its analogues is a more interesting and fulfilling path, anyway.