Time Series Classification to Improve Poultry Welfare
This work addresses animal welfare concerns in poultry farming by enabling automated health assessment, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a specific domain challenge.
The paper tackled the problem of classifying chicken behaviors from sparse and noisy time series data to improve poultry welfare, introducing a novel dictionary learning algorithm that learns robustly from weakly labeled sources.
Poultry farms are an important contributor to the human food chain. Worldwide, humankind keeps an enormous number of domesticated birds (e.g. chickens) for their eggs and their meat, providing rich sources of low-fat protein. However, around the world, there have been growing concerns about the quality of life for the livestock in poultry farms; and increasingly vocal demands for improved standards of animal welfare. Recent advances in sensing technologies and machine learning allow the possibility of automatically assessing the health of some individual birds, and employing the lessons learned to improve the welfare for all birds. This task superficially appears to be easy, given the dramatic progress in recent years in classifying human behaviors, and given that human behaviors are presumably more complex. However, as we shall demonstrate, classifying chicken behaviors poses several unique challenges, chief among which is creating a generalizable dictionary of behaviors from sparse and noisy data. In this work we introduce a novel time series dictionary learning algorithm that can robustly learn from weakly labeled data sources.