BroilerTrack: Automatic multi-camera multi-broiler tracking

Efficient and continuous tracking of individual broilers is critical for improving poultry management, welfare, and breeding decisions in commercial settings. However, standard Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) techniques face significant challenges in poultry environments due to occlusions, high object s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Thinh Phan, Hoang Kim Tran, Andrew Lockett, Isaac Phillips, Hao Vo, Duy Le, Michael T. Kidd, James Mason, Santiago Avendano, Ngan Le
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2025-12-01
Series:Smart Agricultural Technology
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Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277237552500543X
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Summary:Efficient and continuous tracking of individual broilers is critical for improving poultry management, welfare, and breeding decisions in commercial settings. However, standard Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) techniques face significant challenges in poultry environments due to occlusions, high object similarity, and dense flocks.In this work, we introduce BroilerTrack, a novel multi-camera multi-broiler tracking framework tailored for the poultry industry. Unlike traditional approaches that rely heavily on appearance features, BroilerTrack employs a position-based tracking strategy in a unified coordinate system (unified plane), thereby circumventing identity ambiguity caused by the homogeneous appearance of broilers. Our proposed BroilerTrack system comprises three key modules: Top-view Aggregation, Side-view Distribution, and Identification Assignment, enabling robust identification (ID) consistency across multiple calibrated views. Furthermore, we present a new Multi-View Broiler dataset collected under commercial-like conditions, featuring synchronized footage from six strategically placed cameras (two top-view and four side-view). Notably, our method requires no unified-plane annotations during training and achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art Multi-camera MOT methods on both detection and association metrics. This work provides a scalable, non-intrusive solution for real-time poultry monitoring, with strong potential for applications in behavior analysis, welfare optimization, and automated breeding selection.
ISSN:2772-3755