Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive Reidentification

The chicken is the world’s most farmed animal. In this work, we introduce the Chicks4FreeID dataset, the first publicly available dataset focused on the reidentification of individual chickens. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the existing animal reidentification datasets. Next, we...

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Main Authors: Daria Kern, Tobias Schiele, Ulrich Klauck, Winfred Ingabire
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2024-12-01
Series:Animals
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/15/1/1
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author Daria Kern
Tobias Schiele
Ulrich Klauck
Winfred Ingabire
author_facet Daria Kern
Tobias Schiele
Ulrich Klauck
Winfred Ingabire
author_sort Daria Kern
collection DOAJ
description The chicken is the world’s most farmed animal. In this work, we introduce the Chicks4FreeID dataset, the first publicly available dataset focused on the reidentification of individual chickens. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the existing animal reidentification datasets. Next, we conduct closed-set reidentification experiments on the introduced dataset, using transformer-based feature extractors in combination with two different classifiers. We evaluate performance across domain transfer, supervised, and one-shot learning scenarios. The results demonstrate that transfer learning is particularly effective with limited data, and training from scratch is not necessarily advantageous even when sufficient data are available. Among the evaluated models, the vision transformer paired with a linear classifier achieves the highest performance, with a mean average precision of 97.0%, a top-1 accuracy of 95.1%, and a top-5 accuracy of 100.0%. Our evaluation suggests that the vision transformer architecture produces higher-quality embedding clusters than the Swin transformer architecture. All data and code are publicly shared under a CC BY 4.0 license.
format Article
id doaj-art-d635d1d6de374eb7b538aeb14faa0f01
institution Kabale University
issn 2076-2615
language English
publishDate 2024-12-01
publisher MDPI AG
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series Animals
spelling doaj-art-d635d1d6de374eb7b538aeb14faa0f012025-01-10T13:13:45ZengMDPI AGAnimals2076-26152024-12-01151110.3390/ani15010001Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive ReidentificationDaria Kern0Tobias Schiele1Ulrich Klauck2Winfred Ingabire3Faculty Electronics & Computer Science, Aalen University, 73430 Aalen, GermanyFaculty Electronics & Computer Science, Aalen University, 73430 Aalen, GermanyFaculty Electronics & Computer Science, Aalen University, 73430 Aalen, GermanySchool of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow G4 0BA, UKThe chicken is the world’s most farmed animal. In this work, we introduce the Chicks4FreeID dataset, the first publicly available dataset focused on the reidentification of individual chickens. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the existing animal reidentification datasets. Next, we conduct closed-set reidentification experiments on the introduced dataset, using transformer-based feature extractors in combination with two different classifiers. We evaluate performance across domain transfer, supervised, and one-shot learning scenarios. The results demonstrate that transfer learning is particularly effective with limited data, and training from scratch is not necessarily advantageous even when sufficient data are available. Among the evaluated models, the vision transformer paired with a linear classifier achieves the highest performance, with a mean average precision of 97.0%, a top-1 accuracy of 95.1%, and a top-5 accuracy of 100.0%. Our evaluation suggests that the vision transformer architecture produces higher-quality embedding clusters than the Swin transformer architecture. All data and code are publicly shared under a CC BY 4.0 license.https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/15/1/1chickenpoultrylivestockre-IDindividual identificationtransformer
spellingShingle Daria Kern
Tobias Schiele
Ulrich Klauck
Winfred Ingabire
Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive Reidentification
Animals
chicken
poultry
livestock
re-ID
individual identification
transformer
title Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive Reidentification
title_full Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive Reidentification
title_fullStr Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive Reidentification
title_full_unstemmed Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive Reidentification
title_short Towards Automated Chicken Monitoring: Dataset and Machine Learning Methods for Visual, Noninvasive Reidentification
title_sort towards automated chicken monitoring dataset and machine learning methods for visual noninvasive reidentification
topic chicken
poultry
livestock
re-ID
individual identification
transformer
url https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/15/1/1
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AT tobiasschiele towardsautomatedchickenmonitoringdatasetandmachinelearningmethodsforvisualnoninvasivereidentification
AT ulrichklauck towardsautomatedchickenmonitoringdatasetandmachinelearningmethodsforvisualnoninvasivereidentification
AT winfredingabire towardsautomatedchickenmonitoringdatasetandmachinelearningmethodsforvisualnoninvasivereidentification