In the domain of egg production, the application of automation technologies is essential for boosting productivity and quality. This study introduces an online monitoring system designed for egg quality assessment within caged environments, incorporating a robotic patrol system for egg localization and a fixed video stream for quality analysis. The project involved upgrading traditional henhouses with enhanced wireless connectivity and developing data transmission techniques for video streams and image data. The core of the system, an enhanced You Only Look Once Version 8-small (YOLOv8s) model, was augmented by substituting the Residual Network-18 backbone and integrating the Shuffle Attention mechanism, significantly improving egg detection precision. This refined model was implemented on Jetson AGX Orin industrial computer to facilitate real-world applications. To diverse operational needs, two distinct post-processing algorithms were developed: one for counting eggs and detecting abnormalities during robotic patrols, and another for assessing egg quality through fixed video streams, which measured crucial parameters such as egg dimensions and shape indexes. Experimental results revealed that the henhouse average network latencies of 35 ms, with signal strengths between -30 and -71 dBm, ensuring data transmission to the poultry management system. The enhanced YOLOv8s model, deployed on the Jetson AGX Orin, demonstrated well improvements: a Precision of 94.0 % (+2.4 %), Recall rate of 92.8 % (+4.6 %), Average Precision_50:95 of 91.5 % (+3 %) and F1 score of 93.4 % (+3.9 %), with a minor decrease in detection speed to 91.7 Frame Per Second (-18.2). Field experiment in 60 chicken cages during robotic patrols achieved an egg recognition rate of 98.9 %, validating the system's effectiveness. In fixed settings, an 83-minute experiment managed to analyze egg numbers and abnormalities, attaining a 100 % recognition rate with all scoring data promptly relayed back to the management system. Overall, this research introduces a comprehensive system for monitoring egg production and quality in cage environments, addressing manual recording and quality assessment challenges in caged poultry farming. This study is crucial for optimizing modern livestock management, enhancing production efficiency, and ensuring animal welfare.

Poultry managers can better understand the state of poultry through poultry behavior analysis. As one of the key steps in behavior analysis, the accurate estimation of poultry posture is the focus of this research. This study mainly analyzes a top-down pose estimation method of multiple chickens. Therefore, we propose the “multi-chicken pose” (MCP), a pose estimation system for multiple chickens through deep learning. Firstly, we find the position of each chicken from the image via the chicken detector; then, an estimate of the pose of each chicken is made using a pose estimation network, which is based on transfer learning. On this basis, the pixel error (PE), root mean square error (RMSE), and image quantity distribution of key points are analyzed according to the improved chicken keypoint similarity (CKS). The experimental results show that the algorithm scores in different evaluation metrics are a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.652, a mean average recall (mAR) of 0.742, a percentage of correct keypoints (PCKs) of 0.789, and an RMSE of 17.30 pixels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that transfer learning has been used for the pose estimation of multiple chickens as objects. The method can provide a new path for future poultry behavior analysis

The estimation of tea leaf pose is an emerging research topic. Recognising the morphological features of tea leaves can help accurately categorise, grade, and determine their level of maturity. Therefore, this study proposes a deep neural network, TeaPoseNet, to estimate tea leaf poses. The algorithm was trained and validated using a dataset of one-bud-one-leaf images of Yinghong No.9 tea leaves and was compared with four other pose estimation networks. At the same time, the contribution of TKS_NMS to the algorithm was validated through ablation experiments. The results indicate that TKS_NMS improved the EPE accuracy of pose recognition by 16.33 %. More specifically, the algorithm achieved a good overall performance, with PCK, AUC, EPE, and NME reaching 0.9800, 0.8147, 9.0955, and 0.0644, respectively. The average running speed for detecting the pose of a single tea leaf image was 40.01 ms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of pose estimation technology to the detection and analysis of Yinghong No.9 tea leaves. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively estimate the pose of tea leaves, thus providing a reference for subsequent tea research.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely recognized as a force that will fundamentally transform traditional chicken farming models. It can reduce labor costs while ensuring welfare and at the same time increase output and quality. However, the breadth of AI’s contribution to chicken farming has not been systematically quantified on a large scale; few people know how far current AI has actually progressed or how it will improve chicken farming to enhance the sector’s sustainability. Therefore, taking “AI + sustainable chicken farming” as the theme, this study retrieved 254 research papers for a comprehensive descriptive analysis from the Web of Science (May 2003 to March 2025) and analyzed AI’s contribution to the sustainable in recent years. Results show that: In the welfare dimension, AI primarily targets disease surveillance, behavior monitoring, stress detection, and health scoring, enabling earlier, less-invasive interventions and more stable, longer productive lifespans. In economic dimension, tools such as automated counting, vision-based weighing, and precision feeding improve labor productivity and feed use while enhancing product quality. In the environmental dimension, AI supports odor prediction, ventilation monitoring, and control strategies that lower emissions and energy use, reducing farms’ environmental footprint. However, large-scale adoption remains constrained by the lack of open and interoperable model and data standards, the compute and reliability burden of continuous multi-sensor monitoring, the gap between AI-based detection and fully automated control, and economic hurdles such as high upfront costs, unclear long-term returns, and limited farmer acceptance, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Environmental applications are also underrepresented because research has been overly vision-centric while audio and IoT sensing receive less attention. Looking ahead, AI development should prioritize solutions that are low cost, robust, animal friendly, and transparent in their benefits so that return on investment is visible in practice, supported by open benchmarks and standards, edge-first deployment, and staged cost–benefit pilots. Technically, integrating video, audio, and environmental sensors into a perception–cognition–action loop and updating policies through online learning can enable full-process adaptive management that improves welfare, enhances resource efficiency, reduces emissions, and increases adoption across diverse production contexts.

Accurately counting chickens in densely packed cages is a major challenge in large-scale poultry farms. Traditional manual counting methods are labor-intensive, costly, and prone to errors due to worker fatigue. Furthermore, current deep learning models often struggle with accuracy in caged environments because they are not well-equipped to handle occlusions. In response, we propose the You Only Look Once-Chicken Counting Algorithm (YOLO-CCA). YOLO-CCA improves the YOLOv8-small model by integrating the CoordAttention mechanism and the Reversible Column Networks backbone. This enhancement improved the YOLOv8-small model’s F1 score to 96.7% (+3%) and average precision_50:95 to 80.6% (+2.8%). Additionally, we developed a threshold-based continuous frame inspection method that records the maximum number of chickens per cage with corresponding timestamps. The data are stored in a cloud database for reliable tracking during robotic inspections. The experiments were conducted in an actual poultry farming environment, involving 80 cages with a total of 493 chickens, and showed that YOLO-CCA raised the chicken recognition rate to 90.9% (+13.2%). When deployed on a Jetson AGX Orin industrial computer using TensorRT, the detection speed increased to 90.9 FPS (+57.6 FPS), although the recognition rate slightly decreased to 93.2% (−2.9%). In summary, YOLO-CCA reduces labor costs, improves counting efficiency, and supports intelligent poultry farming transformation.