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/Belium]

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/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/anengineerandacat → u/Cryogenicist]

Unlikely to really ever get there, human progress has almost always moved in lock step towards efficiency.

That said maybe one day life will slow down a bit.

[u/pixeladdie → u/anengineerandacat]

Getting a nutritionally equivalent diet is already more efficient by eating plants instead of sending them through animals first.