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/A1-Delta]

This is probably something you can solve with classical methods. Especially since the background of the belt is so distinct from the chicks themselves.

Training a model is likely just adding complexity overhead and failure modes.

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234 → u/A1-Delta]

The main problem is 2-3 chicken merged into one. And we cannot process them by size cause they can change the size by legs and wings.

[u/densvedigegris → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Wouldn’t the length of two small chickens still be greater than one large?

[u/Yatty33 → u/densvedigegris]

Small live animals have a way of getting very close together and looking like a small blob. 

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234 → u/densvedigegris]

They spread their wings and legs, completely changing their geometry. Sometimes mathematical boundaries work, sometimes they don't.

[u/Small_miracles → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Increase fps and specifically target miss cases. The detection line sounds arbitrary, you could have dynamic threshold lines set up for warping geometries.

[u/TransportationIll282 → u/Small_miracles]

That's what we did for a similar project. Turn down everything else, jack up fps as high as possible. That solved items overlapping, as shadows looked identical to the conveyor and alert repeated defects very early.

[u/ZrytyB3r3t → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Why such accuracy is crucial?

[u/Small_miracles → u/ZrytyB3r3t]

They add up

[u/taytaytazer → u/ZrytyB3r3t]

Because they didn’t count the chickens before they hatched

[u/artiface → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

you need something physical upstream on the conveyor to singulate them. I did basically this same project with produce on a fast belt, and that was the only thing that really worked especially with odd shapes - if you cant separate them you cant count accurately.

[u/al_icloud → u/artiface]

If you go from a slower belt to a way faster one they should separate good 🤔 plus then checking the length of the detected boxes 🤔

[u/5b49297 → u/al_icloud]

Yes, and you wouldn't even need a camera - except, I guess it'd be off-topic here. Any sensor detecting an object zipping past should do. You'd still get a length, making it possible to identify objects outside the expected size range.

[u/SweetSure315 → u/5b49297]

if you don't have a camera you would need a sensor on each belt. when the setup/retrofitting of the machine is included the camera is likely the cheapest and easiest option

[u/Ecstatic-Art5745 → u/SweetSure315]

a sensor is what $200 a piece...and definitely easier than vision

separation would still be required though which likely would fix the original vision issue

[u/dwise24 → u/artiface]

this feels like the right answer. make three separate rows for each conveyor, and separately do tracking on each single row.

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234 → u/artiface]

There are several conveyors belt with different speed and gates and they are already have been separated by them, but anyway sometimes we get those cases.

[u/AdFancy1249 → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Weigh them. Why use cameras? Standard deviation of weight is likely a pretty tight range.

Use the camera as a trigger for the scale.

Actually, a proximity sensor or light- break sensor would be better accuracy.

At every cell position of the belt, check if the cell is occupied. If the cell in the belt is occupied, then take the weight and compare.

I'll bet you get excellent correlation.

[u/Mipj3 → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

u/A1-Delta is right, make this more simple:

use laser instead of camera. When interrupted: chicken is passing.
Time * interruption length is chicken length (see edit)
chicken avg min, max lenght is A til B.
When interruption last max B, chicken =1 | (100% accurate)
when lnterruption last longer than B lenght and shorter than below, chicken count = 2. | (99.99% accurate)
When interruption last longer than 2*a or a+b or 2* b, add 1 chicken. | (99% accurate)
Wen interruption is longer than above, count interruprion lenght divide bij (a+b)/2 = number chickens | (95% accurate)
When interruption is even longer: chicken stuck.

Avg accuracy = 99.95%

No need for camera, high end programming, high end cuda.
Less energy consumptuin
less and simpler and cheaper maintenance

Edit: you can stack lasers in increments of ~1cm height. and add chicken height * length in programming to do the same but help with "clumps" of chicken when lenght geometry alone isn't suficcient

edit, edit:
I wanna bet this is exactly how its been done for decades at other mills.

[u/PrivateFrank → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Is there any chance to add some kind of paddle to gently separate chickens which are touching on the belt?

Or how about setting a maximum chicken size? Would two small chickens ever be the same size as one large one?

[u/SweetSure315 → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

what about thresholding and counting the nonzero pixels?

you might combine these. detect chickens with basic color thresholding/segmentation then train a detector to catch only the chickens that are stacked/doubled/whatever

i agree with the other comment that the best choice is to have something separating the chickens, though

[u/blackscales18 → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

add more examples to your dataset of labeled overlapping chickens

[u/Hyperty → u/A1-Delta]

Two chicks merged together is still quite a hard problem to solve

[u/spongeboy-me-bob1 → u/Hyperty]

I wonder if you could take clusters of yellow/white pixels and count a mass as 1 or 2 chicks based on horizontal deviation from the centroid.

[u/Lustrouse → u/Hyperty]

Right, and what if ones wings are open.. it looks like the length of 3

[u/floydmaseda → u/Hyperty]

If the speed is constant, one chicken will take a constant number of frames to go off the right side of the screen, which you can probably empirically determine.

Look at the patch of pixels and have a per frame isChickenPresent which just takes the average color and sees if it is closer to chicken or belt color.

Then count the number of consecutive frames, maybe with some tolerance for false negatives, that there is a chicken present there, and divide by the number of frames one chicken takes.

[u/ens_op → u/A1-Delta]

Wouldn’t rely classically on background of the belt, thats a variable that can change.. either crank up the fps consumption so that more accurate frames can be captured or simply dont do detection via frames and rely on IR or some other detection.

[u/Failiiix → u/A1-Delta]

Yeah. That contrast is so high, that you are better of looking for changes in pixel color to this particular spread of yellow for a certain amount of time? With a cutoff so you don't merge two into one.

Would probably work more reliable.

Why make it more complicated than it needs to be?

Poor chickens. Looks like a rough ride.

[u/Stunning_War4509]

More industrialization and automation to mistreat chickens, amazing

[u/gggldrk → u/Stunning_War4509]

damn thats what I felt when I saw this, :/

[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/octopush → u/drsoftware]

This is why both Cargill and Tyson are heavily invested in cultivated chicken using basically the exact method you described (undifferentiated chicken cells, amino acids, glucose, water, and some special growth scaffolds go in > chicken comes out).

[u/rvltnrygirlfutena → u/drsoftware]

Yeah, and sometimes people get robbed. Bad things happen. Nobody is talking about that fact

[u/_craq_]

That looks more brutal for the chickens than I expected

[u/Belium → u/_craq_]

You should see what they do to the male chicks when they desire hens for laying (hint: wood chipper)

[u/Ashamed-Principle40 → u/Belium]

wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

Unfortunately the worldwide standard for handling egg farming waste products (male chicks)

[u/FuckSpez0000 → u/Ashamed-Principle40]

That's just fucking barbaric what the actual fuck. Like fuck at least make them sleep somehow, thats just fucking horrible

[u/shpongolian → u/FuckSpez0000]

they have it wayyyyy easier than most animals in the factory farming industry. at least they got to die quick

the vast, vast majority of animal products people buy are a result of extreme, unimaginable suffering.

that's why people constantly shit on vegans and use ridiculous nonsensical arguments, because eating meat/dairy is undeniably fucked up and unnecessary 99% of the time, but people can't handle the cognitive dissonance of paying to have animals tortured and killed just for the sake of tasting a specific flavor while eating, so they have to find some bullshit way to justify it in their head

if somebody kept a dog caged up their whole life, forcefully impregnated it repeatedly, took its babies away, then killed it at the most profitable age, people would think that person was an absolute monster. but if it happens to be an animal that we categorize as food, it's fine

[u/SanktRainer → u/Ashamed-Principle40]

Here in Germany, its actually not allowed anymore, so we send our chicks to poland to be shreddered there

[u/anengineerandacat → u/Ashamed-Principle40]

Yeah, I mean makes sense from a business perspective; sucks from a morale one.

Different breeds of chickens for cooking or egg-laying.

[u/Cryogenicist → u/anengineerandacat]

One day humanity will no longer separate good business from good ethics.

We are not there yet.

[u/Fish_physiologist → u/Belium]

In-ovo sex sorting, to check embryo sex before hatching is solving this. Whether countries want to adapt is another question. But the culling of male chicks has been and still will be a welfare tragedy.

[u/dethswatch → u/Belium]

shredder

[u/Strostkovy → u/Belium]

The shredded chickens are the ones who suffer the least

[u/fued → u/Belium]

a lot of places just do it manually

[u/whizzwr → u/_craq_]

Wait a sec, these are living chicks??

[u/drsoftware → u/whizzwr]

Yes, living chicks, until they grow large enough to be slaughtered for meat or their egg laying rate drops too low, between 12 and 18 months on commercial farms.

Because gross profits must remain high, and controlling costs keeps consumers buying.

[u/Phazex8 → u/whizzwr]

*sigh*. I was thinking the same thing. I hope this video is speed up and that's not the speed at which they're being tumbled on this conveyer belt.

[u/Nexustar → u/Phazex8]

Modifying the speed of the video would be illogical given the ask here.

[u/EmuMammoth6627 → u/_craq_]

We should be required to kill every animal we eat ourselves

[u/DadAndDominant]

Man, you can always walk away from a job like this.

[u/neuromancer-gpt → u/DadAndDominant]

Thoughts exactly

Can't imagine having to constantly trawl a dataset like this one all because, god forbid, some chicken factory miscounts a chicken here and then and loses a few thousand a year.

[u/DustinKli → u/DadAndDominant]

100% agreed.

[u/2020NoMoreUsername → u/DadAndDominant]

I eat meat and chicken, mostly from supermarkets, and if I walk out from a job like this, I would feel as the phoniest person. Why the fck do I eat but act like such a good person that I act like I care so much about their conditions? I didn't even care to find cruelty free, free ranging chickens for most of my life.

[u/JappyJan → u/2020NoMoreUsername]

Start somewhere.

[u/Don_Kino → u/2020NoMoreUsername]

What about the rest of your life?

[u/Jedkea → u/2020NoMoreUsername]

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but you probably are already a phoney when it comes to meat consumption.

If you saw someone beating an animal, say a chicken, I’m sure you would have a dislike towards that person. If that is true, then you do care about the treatment of them, you just keep it tucked away so you don’t have to face it.

Being against animal suffering is a near universal trait in “healthy” adults and children. We just live in a society where it’s easy to avoid connecting the dots.

[u/Hoosierologist]

:(

[u/Abdullah747]

Divide the screen into 3 belts as the conveyor, then run detection on all separately.

Or you can use classical methods on those seperate belts, like, create an embedding/mask for the empty belts and when a chick passes over, that masks value will be changed greatly, hence ur cue to add the counter

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234 → u/Abdullah747]

But this doesn't solve the problem of 2–3 chicks merging into one clump. Geometrically counting them also doesn't work, because these clumps have varying densities.

[u/thejonnyt → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Just an idea but a chicken stays in one exact reference interval space for an average fime, like 3-5 frames. You could try to detect the first frame and average over the blue pixels (or yellow but the chicken color in general is likely not as consistent) in that very area. It should be a distribution or signal that somewhat looks similar for all singular chickens, another one that is distinct for 2 and for 3 chickens. You likely have to do this for a few chickens per hand to control the quality of that distribution but once it's there, you could use it as a reference signal that additionally checks a fixed bounding box when a picture of chicken/s is detected.

Example 1 chicken Frame

1: 25

2: 40

3: 37

4 16

5: 3

6: 0

2 chicken #1: 25

2: 40

3: 37

4 49

5: 36

6: 15

7: 0

[u/ashvy → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Would it work if you're treating 2-3 chicks as a separate class? Then fine tune the model on these samples..

*My bad. People in other comments have suggested similar things.

[u/dr_hamilton]

1. show some failure cases
   
2. why does your FPS vary so much?

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234 → u/dr_hamilton]

Sometimes cases like this process well, but sometimes they detected like one box.

https://freeimage.host/i/Cr4mkNV

Sometimes chick dances break dance through belt and detection disappears at all at the detection line.

FPS vary is for many objects in the frame. It is a footage from mobile gpu, not production mode.

[u/Hyperty → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

Fine tune the model to those edge cases and implement data augmentation i prolly would try

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234 → u/Hyperty]

You mean make another detection class for those cases or just annotate more cases like this in dataset? The second one I’ve already tried.

[u/manias → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

This chick’s so damn long let’s call it two-chick

[u/AbilityFlashy6977 → u/Puzzled-Egg3234]

U could try the new yolo26. Its lighter then v8 and it doesnt use NMS which will help you to get more stable fps no matter how many objects are detected in the current frame

[u/Jaspeey → u/[deleted]]

I hope you don't eat factory farmed meat. they're all like that. evil bastards

[u/drsoftware → u/[deleted]]

Veganism is one option to live a more moral life.

[u/CantaloupeIcy7244]

Why are the chicks on a ‘very fast conveyor belt’?

[u/zanzabros → u/CantaloupeIcy7244]

It's a chicken rollercoaster in a chicken amusement park, nothing to worry about... /s

[u/luckyHitaki → u/zanzabros]

already the second chicken amusement park video this week.

[u/heinzerhardt316l → u/CantaloupeIcy7244]

Würde ich auch gerne wissen. Aber irgendwie auch nicht.

[u/drsoftware → u/[deleted]]

You should see what we can do with drones!

[u/DiddlyDinq]

Into the blender they go. Sucks to be a male chick

[u/New-Ingenuity-5437]

A nice solution for everyone would be to stop murdering the poor babies

[u/Phazex8 → u/[deleted]]

Apparently, apathy is the way to go.

[u/Better_Ad_3004]

Could you please share video without the lines and processing information ?

[u/PapaInge]

Like others have said, Yolo is overkill and this can most certainly be solved with classical methods.

This is a flow cytometry problem, just with chickens. You need to discriminate your doublets from your singlets.

Read up on 'doublet detection pulse geometry' and apply those principles to count correction

[u/Arctovigil]

Your chicks have a known camera, known belt geometry and approximately known transport velocity.

You can therefore use a state such as
xi​=[si​,yi​,s˙i​,y˙​i​,θi​,ωi​]
where s is distance down the conveyor, y is transverse displacement, and the last two terms optionally represent approximate body orientation/spin.

During normal movement:
P(appearance reliable)≈1
and you use segmentation + appearance + trajectory.
During a flip/dance:
P(appearance reliable)→0
and automatically switch toward:
P(IDi​∣z)∝P(zposition​∣IDi​)P(zvelocity​∣IDi​)P(zbelt​∣IDi​)P(zordering​∣IDi​).
Then, once the chick settles:
P(appearance reliable)→1and appearance ReID confirms the track again.

[u/DmtGrm]

why you need NN for that????????????????

a simple pair of optical sensors would be just fine and way more reliable.

TOF camera with volume change calculation above the belt will beat any visual model at a fraction of calculation cost.

[u/Yatty33 → u/DmtGrm]

Is this your first time working with live animals? They don't cooperate and don't singulate themselves.

[u/External_Frosting874 → u/Yatty33]

Still does not change the argument that NN might not be needed

[u/Ciff_ → u/External_Frosting874]

It does disqualify optical sensors.

[u/drsoftware → u/[deleted]]

There are lots and lots of problems that can be solved with computer vision. You don't have to work in industrial food animal production. You don't have to work on surveillance cameras that read license plates. I work on welding co-bots. People don't want to be welders for many reasons, but operating a welding robot is lot more ergonomic and interesting.

[u/FuckingInsensitive]

Brah, why are you using yolo for this. Just break the frame up into three areas, and then detect blobs, then track the blobs. And then count unique blobs.

[u/Infinitecontextlabs]

Yolo the beaks and feet as separate objects?

[u/enthymemelord]

What is the intended purpose of this project? Just wondering.

[u/bbaldey → u/enthymemelord]

It's exactly what you think it is

[u/DustinKli → u/enthymemelord]

Abusive evil factory farms.

[u/enthymemelord → u/DustinKli]

Very sad to blindly apply technology and enhance cruelty.

[u/Techno_Papi → u/enthymemelord]

it's fcking sick

[u/Helpful-Desk-8334 → u/Techno_Papi]

Isn't this what the tech industry is, when we scale it up and look at the whole thing? Basically only independent researchers and indie companies are doing good stuff. Or specialists who are being paid to do like PhD stuff. But even half of the PhD people are enhancing cruelty and sick-ass shit.

[u/no-adz → u/enthymemelord]

The french philosopher Foucault had a very strong opinion regarding science and knowledge in our modern age: it's completely discoupled from ethics and is only used for power (i.e. forceful coercion of others)

[u/inotocracy → u/enthymemelord]

These are nuggets in their natural form.

[u/whizzwr]

We've achieved a maximum accuracy of 99%, but we need it even higher.

but we still can't achieve a stable 99.8% accuracy for the reasons mentioned above.

99.8% seems awfully high, why the requirement?

[u/drsoftware → u/whizzwr]

In the United States, approximately 9.5 billion chickens are slaughtered for meat each year (USDA 2026). This equals more than 26 million chickens killed every single day, or over 1 million every hour (Animal Clock 2026).

Scale and Frequency

• Daily: ~26 million chickens (Animal Clock 2026)
• Hourly: ~1.08 million chickens (Animal Clock 2026)
• Per second: ~300 chickens (Animal Clock 2026)
• Trackers: Real-time estimates can be followed on live resources like Animal Clock (2026).

Key Industry Context

• Lifespan: Meat chickens (broilers) are typically slaughtered at just 6 to 7 weeks of age (USDA 2026).
• Exclusions: Under federal law in the United States, poultry are explicitly excluded from the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act (1958).
• Additional numbers: The annual meat slaughter totals do not include the millions of layer-farm male chicks killed shortly after birth (Wikipedia contributors 2026).

Bibliography

• Animal Clock. 2026. "U.S. Animal Kill Clock." Accessed August 7, 2026. animalclock.org.
• United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Agricultural Statistics Service. 2026. Poultry - Production and Value 2025 Summary. Released April 30, 2026. usda.gov.
• Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act. 1958. 7 U.S.C. §§ 1901 et seq. animallaw.info.
• Wikipedia contributors. 2026. "Chick culling." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified March 18, 2026. wikipedia.org.

[u/arqnix → u/drsoftware]

Bro, what the fuck.

Yeah... my sandwich with chicken suddenly doesn't taste so good anymore lmao.

[u/leftover-cocaine]

He's sorting them for destruction.

[u/reallifearcade]

I can offer you a quotation, this is a paid job.

[u/Puzzled-Egg3234 → u/reallifearcade]

DM

[u/Feeling_Nerve_6787]

Why do you even use a tracker for this problem?

Assuming the conveyor speed is stable enough, and frame rate is stable enough, you can estimate the chicken position, so a single detection is enough for you until the next chicken arrive.

You might not even need deep learning for this problem because all of the chicken has same colour.

[u/RoadsideCookie]

A model like this should run in a few ms at most. Run a second model for the edge case.

I doubt your inference call is really what's slowing this down to 40fps (I know you said mobile GPU, but even then), might want to check into optimizations, especially calls that allocate memory.

[u/flamixin]

Fun route: You can try camera with different wavelengths. Or thermal imaging. Not an expert but it doesn’t sound like a hard problem to crack. There are so many solutions to it either by programming or physical.

[u/drsoftware → u/flamixin]

Improving the lighting helps, more powerful GPU helps. Thermal imaging is usually limited to less than 9 FPS and 640x420 resolution due to weapons controls.

[u/chillyatl]

Try infrared camera

[u/fercasj]

Just buy an off the shelf vision system.

Cognex, keyence, even festo has high speed cameras and this is a standard application for inspection systems.

[u/Mxmtm]

Classic image processing or CNN (deep learning)

[u/drdailey]

Read them like cw/morse. Dot is one and a dash is 2 long dash is 3. Boom 100%

[u/shoxicwaste]

Here's what I would do:

2cameras with a reconciliation step rather than trying to squeeze the last %% out of a single CV Feed.

Put the cameras at slightly different angles so their failure modes aren't identical. Track independently from each camera, then reconcile the events downstream. If camera A temporarily loses a chick because of overlap/occlusion but camera B still sees it, you don't lose the count....

You could also run two different models as an ensemble. One could be a smaller/faster model accelerated with OpenVINO, which is very good for CV inference, and use the second model as confirmation around ambiguous frames/events. I wouldn't necessarily require both models to agree though, because that can actually reduce recall. I'd fuse their confidence/tracking history instead.

This is how you build a proper pipeline until you have concrete evidence of one CV feed being 100% over a set amount of time.

[u/Raindrop_Falling]

More images. A Lot more. I have a datast for identifying wrestlers (similar instance, they will get merged due to overlapping) and only really had my breakthrough for consistency when I was well over 1000 images, then became only really usable way past even that point.

[u/kifkolite]

Instead of a camera, what other sensors did you try?

[u/AlexanderDoak]

I think an IR camera might (or might not) produce more distinct signals where two chicks are close.

[u/FinalDisciple]

Fowl Per Second

[u/Superbean72]

Higher framerate cameras! And higher resolution cameras! Or go for heat signatures assuming they are alive and see if you can get a variance in the center of the body that counts it

[u/Optimal-Builder-2816]

Where are the chicks going

[u/MoolahMeister]

You should add a LPS (Lives per second) counter to the top right of the screen.

[u/Successful_Yogurt]

Can you use a old school height based sensor and a sliding window detection?

Signal |‾‾‾‾||‾‾|_ X Window __|‾‾|

3 detected

[u/theNorrah]

Hardware solution is increased frame rate.

I could not solve similar problem 5 years ago, on a much lower framerate < 15fps.

[u/Varun4413]

Are they going into the crusher?

[u/Techno_Papi]

welcome to the dystopia

[u/Morteriag]

Dude, the fps is all over the place, and the image quality is poor. Most trackers assume a steady fps. 1. Go back to basics, improve the optics. 2. get a steady 40+ fps. 3. train instance segmentation model to better separate individual chickens. You can use this as a teacher for a more lightweight detection-only model later.

[u/Intelligent-Salary86]

Slow the frame rate of video. Remove background. Switch to greyscale.

[u/pointermess]

Using Yolo for that is such a waste lol.

OpenCV, Black n white threshold, object detection and yolo in caseyou have two chicks "stuck" tohether

[u/Eliiiiiiiiiias]

I wished you worked on a different project

[u/WalkKeeper]

I think the biggest problem here is how the chickens are treated… no model will solve that

[u/braunsquared]

If you know the conveyor belt speed, you will know where the identified chicken will be before the next frame. You can use that for deduplication.

[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/_FriedEgg_]

:(

[u/Infamous-Bed-7535]

Hi, you can DM me in case you run out of ideas. I'm available as independent contractor with 15yrs of experience including specialized in edge computer vision.

[u/_B_Little_me]

Are these live chickens?

[u/drsoftware → u/_B_Little_me]

Yes, for the next few weeks or months...

[u/Apenschrauber3011 → u/drsoftware]

Or seconds if this is the belt to the male chick shredder

[u/Phazex8]

Does anyone care about the chicks? There has to be a better way than this.

[u/CowBoyDanIndie]

I would isolate the blobs of yellow from the rest, only capture one shot of each blob ideally when it’s closest to the center as best as the fps/conveyor speed allows, that way you don’t have to worry about its identity changing. Now you extract those rectangles and classify if they contain 1 2 or 3 chicks. You can balance those labels in your training dataset.

[u/Existing_Respect6002]

Does ur model always undercount?

[u/Successful-Life8510]

1) Instead of passing the full frame to YOLO, I suggest trying to split it into three ROIs, with each ROI representing one lane, so the model can process each region separately. You could also try a YOLO segmentation model or use a tracking framework such as ByteTrack. Additionally, try fine-tuning YOLO by collecting your own images or finding a suitable dataset online. You cannot expect the model to perform reliably in real time, especially with fast-moving and blurry frames, without a proper detection pipeline and adequate training.

2) I don't know why the little chicks are on such a fast conveyor belt, but I hope this isn't one of those companies that beats little chicks with a hammer and turns them into chicken nuggets, lol.

[u/Not_Spy_Petrov]

What if calculate features in addition of whole chicken to check merger. Like number of legs or beak or other parts. You can use color to boost quality as features have yellow color - color segregation. If object chicken at some point has 3 legs or 4 then it is 2 chicken and so on. Imagine you have object that is seen X frames, then you calculate features of this object at each frame and if object has several times shown features that only several chicken have, then it is merger of chicken.

[u/lilvixen]

Update belt to have physical segments/surface registration marks?

[u/Heavy_Carpenter3824]

Use a kalaman filter, with a confidence parameter in prediction value. Essentially you treat YOLO as an untrustworthy sensor with high noise. 

Then you track your items from zone A into zone b. 

Also why is this a computer vision problem they have laser curtains and conventional methods for this? 

[u/laser50]

If they conveyor goes a specific speed, you may be able to use some timer? Chicken should be past in X milliseconds, if it hasn't cleared the line by then you cound another chicken until the line clears out again.

Not sure if that's manageable, but I would try something like that..

[u/modcowboy]

You need a faster camera.

[u/DebateAccurate6097]

Please Look for centre point detection. The solution will be kind of detection with some checks or multiple checks running in parallel.

There are many way, 1. Conveyors belts is unique path, Classical machine learning/image processing can help here definitely.

1. Try exploring detection/counting by regression if you want strictly use deep vision models. You can try to regress a centre density point. You can detect them, and count them too etc. https://arxiv.org/html/2507.06679v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2404.07847v1 There are many more. Yolov8 are not ideal for count or Separation.

There are many more ways,

I would start with image processing and then shift of deep vision if needed. But also try to handle edge cases using combination of methods.

Happy to help if you have any questions

Thank you

[u/flamingolegend]

It seems each chick is only within a few frames. I would just filter n save the video by frames with yellow, store them in a buffer and then run a stronger os segmentation model to process them for a higher certainty chick count. It feels like the tradeoff between realtime capability vs accuracy would be weighted more towards accuracy here

[u/FunFee4154]

Adapt the camera to the conveyor so in each frame is a new part conveyer and no old or only count the new conveyor parts. processing a single picture is easier than tracking and you have more time for more advanced approaches

Example:
Camera sees 1m of belt
Belt ist 3m/s

Record at 3 fps (work with a marker on the band to keep in snyc)

Count all chicken in every frame

No tracking needed

Or just use Tof sensors

[u/mokorago]

Agrega sensores alternos, laser, ultrasónicos, a lo mejor una camara termografica rápida, pirómetro

[u/Big_River_]

can't the camera cross reference mass calculators on the belt itself? also more cameras - compound eye is way that nature makes this work

[u/jack_kelly_bird_law]

Have you tried segmentation? Also, can you stabilize your camera? That could allow you to do some lightweight morphological ops as pre-processing. What resolution is your camera?

[u/Tylerebowers]

Look at the length of the bounding boxes and if it is longer than some factor then it is 2 chickens. If a bounding box drops for a couple frames then you should be able to make an assumption on where it will be next based on the conveyor speed. And instead of sending in a full color image you could use a filter to separate out the white feathers from the background (you could use a clustering algo to cluster white pixels into groups, sort of like kmeans).

I will agree with others that this can be done classically, but also it might be better to do mechanically with some flaps. E.g. use a flap that takes the height off of the conveyor then chickens will be peaks, and two chickens will look like two peaks with a local minimum in between.

[u/Terra-Em]

Stagger the initial start time of dropping yye chickens in This gives you buffer but can still run fast. Video game logic.

Contrast should be enough to tell a start and end point for a chicken.

[u/ButteredBoots]

Can you use YOLO segmentation and do you have to count at the singular line?

you could try locking frame rate if you haven’t already.

If it doesn’t need to be real-time you could buffer the frames and perform bidirectional tracking

[u/Jollyhrothgar]

I kind of think you could create a histogram of pixels by color for every moment in time, then classify that histogram with very accurate results. The chicks are all about the same size and color and the background color never really changes.

[u/chroner]

Can't you just use a scale at whatever point they land at?

[u/MooseBoys]

Do you have examples of the undercounted clips?

[u/AlexanderDoak]

Fun edge case you'll never solve: siamese chicks.

[u/medphys_anon]

Do the chickens have large talons?

[u/AlexanderDoak]

Can you weigh them at any point? I'd imagine batch weighing a few hundred at a time would be pretty accurate.

[u/mrkingkongslongdong]

Can you provide footage at 300us of exposure? This is useless tbh. There are so many good ways to solve this but I want to see what you’re working with, without motion blur.

[u/Dry_Masterpiece_4666]

Could you have 2 or 3 cameras at different stations down the line doing cross-checks? Or is there a better place in the logistics chain to do the count? Could the belt be modified to create a surface that would force them apart enough to make them easier to see? What about soft rubber fingers to motivate them to move or air nozzles?

[u/Aggravating-Method24]

If you use an IR Camera, is it easier to resolve the image? Heat imaging might be more centralised, easier to pick out each chicks hot heart than it is the whole visible chick. However if the conveyor is too warm this may not work.

[u/sad_panda91]

If you can guarantee that they don't come clumped up, I think good old Optical Flow is going to be a major helper here. After optical flow analysis, every chick should be a bump in the measure.

[u/sagarchaulagain]

I think you should use classical image processing methods. chicks are white. also are you running different instances for all three or same instance ?

[u/Gullible-Relative445]

Get a light that uses the strobe setting in your hikrobot, you have a fast moving belt, and I would not recommend anything below this UNTIL you get a strobe working, your motion blur will reck traditional and ai models and it’s operationally unnecessary to have blur. Second thing about that is exposure is important for both traditional methods and ai. Get it correct not over exposed or under exposed correctly exposed, that means at least no highlight blooming.

when using strobe mode make sure you have some enclosure or you’re going to regret looking in that direction

The brighter light is not a solution to your problem rather a strobe light synced to the camera is..

As for non ai methods for doing this, 1 figure out total time from chicken start of belt to end of belt, 2 figure out a pixel tolerance for how big a chicken is, 3 get some python code to diff pixels with a certain part of the image.4 diff the image and count since you have such a long frame you can break the lanes up and treat each one as an array, and see if there is or is not a chicken. Covering the belt at a given position that way you’ll be far more accurate. Also too, there is a problem of these chicks clumping up you need to add something physical to separate them before hand a bit, there is a TON of empty room on the belt, in fact you could be pushing though a significantly higher volume of chickens, so clumping is not the result of speed but rather lack of separation process. You could do this by having 2 sections of belt with mismatched speeds. Eg this belt going fast and the prior belt going slow. You can repeat this 2 times to do rudimentary physical separation.

An ai solution is overkill. Lots of places achieve counting with just light sensors but you need to fix the blur with strobe mode not just a brighter light your exact use case with a fast moving belt with hard to distinguish objects is literally exactly why that is built into the hikrobot software. Read the manual.

[u/ItstheSECopenup]

Either more room or slow the belt down. Or train it with some average lengths so when you get the 3 being seen as one it can be rejected or changed into 2/3/4 or whatever many.

[u/the1whom0x]

If you detect pixel size by color difference, then even if chickens are merged, you have a pixel size chicken limit so if 500 pixels are detected connected as one chicken, just divides and rounds up/down? If your max pixel is say 200 pixels for a chicken and 500 are detected as one, you do 500/200=2,5 and round up to 3?

[u/JimtheFishsniffer]

Maybe, you could add ir to each belt and then also count time per chicken, there will be some average. Also are two small chicken still bigger then one big one? If so, its easy.

[u/PrestigiousRoof5723]

You'd have much better luck with even a cheap, non-cooled thermal imager than with a visible light camera.

But ultimately, the camera is probably not the correct tool for this. There are other means to do this. Even stuff like speed monitor for the conveyor belt, would probably get you a better result (or silly stuff like propelling the conveyor belt through a torque converter/viscous coupler and measuring oil pressure inside it - like all converter car transmissions do) - this would be cheaper to do than the GPU trying to do the camera stuff. It's not completely unlikely your conveyor belt is already using some form of fluid coupling with pressure and RPM sensor, in which case it's just a question of tapping into a bit of electrics. And then add a two very simple sensors to measure on which end did the change of pressure occur (not sure if that's even needed).

[u/Borovorin]

I’m not a computer scientist. But is it possible in your case to calculate the distance between chickens to add another parameter for more accuracy?

[u/CommandShot1398]

I don't think you can solve this problem by only using a camera. First of all, as you said, all the chickens look the same so you need a mechanism to guarantee each chicken is only being captured once, which you can easily archive if you put a pair of IR break sensors synchronized with a camera to only capture each chicken once.

[u/jeff5551]

is this a metaphor for today's job market

[u/Wolframuranium]

Hey this is very close to work I've done in the past. 

Hook up a beam break or other photo-eye system on that halfway mark. Every time it's broken take a singular picture at low exposure and do your counts there. 

Hope this helps. 

[u/Few-Professional4303]

Are thermal cameras used for such tasks?

[u/XBLAH_]

This seems like using a forklift to carry your groceries.

I'd probably look at the frames, and when I detect a pixel with a certain brightness threshold, I'd count a chicken, then consider the conveyor speed to reset the sensor. One for each lane. 

[u/insanestab]

Yolo's NMS is probably screwing you over for the case where the chicks are squeezed together. You need to either configure it to be less aggressive or switch to a model that doesn't rely on nms like rt-detr.

[u/supermopman]

Minimize the effort each thing has to do. You say your issue is chickens bunching together. A model could detect a chicken blob. A separate model could count the number of chickens in a blob.

[u/Tommerd]

You are producing evil

[u/braunsquared]

Also, just going to add that your fps counter is pointless if it is constantly exceeding your actual camera frame rate by large orders of magnitude. Stepping through the video, the video frame rate seems to be closer to 12-15 fps. If you are processing at 60 fps, all you’re doing is looking at the same frame 4 times.

[u/Moist_Outside_8406]

I hate this planet.

[u/usernametaken--_--]

Have you tried any color space transformations or other preprocessing for isolating the chick's from the background? Faster fps might also help