Monitoring the vital behavior of Magang geese raised in flocks based on DH-YoloX

Abstract: The vital behaviors of Magang geese are closely related to their growth and welfare status. Therefore, it is very necessary to accurately identify the key vital behaviors of Magang geese in husbandry and production. This study aims to efficiently and accurately monitor the key behaviors of Magang geese in pens. An improved algorithm was also proposed for the vital behavior of Magang geese using Double Head-YoloX (referred to as MGBM-DH-YoloX). The detection efficiency of the network was enhanced to reduce the number of YoloX heads. A tradeoff was made to balance the foreground and background using the Focal loss objective function. Efficient network training was achieved using migration training. Other techniques were utilized to identify the vital behavior and count their key behaviors once at a fixed time in an efficient and accurate way, including the identification and rule analysis of key behaviors, such as feeding, drinking, rest and stress of Magang Geese. Firstly, MGBM-DH-YoloX enhanced the data of the Magang geese images with Mosaic and Mixup. And then the enhanced dataset was used to train the DH-YoloX (Double Head - YoloX) for the detection of the vital behavior of the waterfowl. Finally, the vital behavior of the Magang geese was counted every 25 frames. The experiment was conducted in a flock-reared environment with the Magang geese as the subject of the case study. A behavioral target detection test was conducted during this time. Waterfowl videos were collected on multiple days from 26 December 2021 to 04 January 2022, and from 10-12 May 2022 at the Nanwei Building Experimental Farm, School of Animal Science, South China Agricultural University, Tianhe District, Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, China. A platform was also built to acquire the data for the behavior detection of geese. The color images of Magang geese were facilitated to integrate the environmental factors in the vicinity of the breeding pen (the height of the pen, as well as the width and height of the equipment box). The bi-directional difference frame was adopted to extract the key frames, in order to quickly extract the required picture production dataset from the video data. A total of 1 600 picture data was extracted from the video data, and selected for a total of 2 000 picture data. A total of 1 600 images were randomly used for the training and validation sets, whereas, 400 images were for the test set in the 10 days of continuous activity video. The results showed that the MGBM-DH-YoloX algorithm achieved an average accuracy of 98.98% mAP, a processing frame rate of 81 frame/s, and a memory consumption of 2 520.04 MB for the detection of Magang geese's behaviors. Meanwhile, it was found that the geese were foraged less frequently, as they grow older, after monitoring the 10-day breeding data. The vital foraging and drinking behaviors simultaneously accounted for 83.74% of the total foraging time per day, indicating the overall companionship trend. There was also a decrease from 90.78% to 74.57%, indicating the gradual separation from the feeding and drinking behavior of Magang Geese with the increase of age. On the contrary, the resting behavior of the experimental geese increased slowly with the increase of age, indicating a gradual adaptation to the caging. The stress behavior was highly random in this experiment. There was an extremely serious emergency caused by irregular feeding, such as the random walking of personnel. Consequently, the MGBM-DH-YoloX can be expected as the video monitoring to intelligently extract the vital behavior of Magang geese. The finding can provide technical support for the automated monitoring of poultry in intelligent breeding supervision.