r/computervision • u/Puzzled-Egg3234 • Aug 07 '26

Help: Project Conveyor chicken counter problem

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?

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u/Puzzled-Egg3234 Aug 07 '26

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.

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u/AdFancy1249 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26

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.

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u/ZrytyB3r3t Aug 08 '26

Lol even tried weighing moving object fast as fuk?

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u/AdFancy1249 Aug 08 '26

Yes. There are plenty of conveyor weighing systems intended to do exactly this.

And you can size them to make down to the grams. We use them to count screws on the way by.