Search

In aquaculture, quantifying the real-time feeding behaviour of fish is essential for making feeding decisions. However, most existing methods for assessing fish appetite are inefficient and subjective. To address these issues, this study proposes an improved tilapia feeding level classification model with ResNet34. First, we introduce the attention module CBAM into the ResNet34 model to adjust the attention of the model according to the importance of different channel features and enhance the effective extraction of important features. We then used migration learning to transfer the knowledge learned from the source data (ImageNet dataset) to the tilapia ingestion image dataset, which allowed us to train the tilapia ingestion behaviour classification model faster while retaining the pre-trained model. Experimental results showed that the improved ResNet34 model in this study achieved an accuracy of 99.72%, an improvement of 7.84 percentage points over the original model. In addition, the model outperformed models such as MobileNetV2, AlexNet, VGG11, ShuffleNet_v2_x0_5 and ResNet18 in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F1 scores.These results suggest that the proposed method can accurately identify feeding behavior of fish and provide a scientific basis for determining feeding amounts.

Pigeon is a kind of poultry with high practicability and economic value, and humidity is an important indicator of the intensive breeding of pigeons, which is closely related to the healthy growth of pigeons. Humidity changes are complex, dynamic, and nonlinear. Accurately predicting humidity values and analyzing their changing trends is crucial to the growth of pigeons. Addressing low prediction accuracy and poor generalization of traditional humidity prediction methods, this paper proposes a combination based on partial least squares (PLS) data dimensionality reduction, Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter, and sparrow optimization algorithm (SSA) Predictive models to improve humidity forecast accuracy. First, the SG filter is used for data smoothing to remove abnormal noise in the data signal to enhance the feature learning ability of the prediction system. Next, the original data is selected through the PLS method to select information higher than the set threshold. Valuable information features are extracted for data dimensionality reduction. In addition, SSA is used to optimize key parameters and structure of the BiGRU model for improved prediction. Finally, a combined prediction model based on SG-PLS-SSA-BiGRU was built to simulate and predict the humidity of the pigeon house. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed model’s high accuracy and stability with minimal prediction error fluctuations, fast calculation speed, good feature extraction ability and generalization ability, and is very effective and reliable for predicting pigeon house breeding humidity.

Dissolved oxygen content is a key indicator of water quality in aquaculture environment. Because of its nonlinearity, dynamics, and complexity, which makes traditional methods face challenges in the accuracy and speed of dissolved oxygen content prediction. As a solution to these issues, this study introduces a hybrid model consisting of the Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) and the Bidirectional Simple Recurrent Unit (BiSRU). Firstly, Linear interpolation and smoothing were used to identify significant parameters. LightGBM algorithm then determines the significance of dissolved oxygen by eliminating irrelevant variables and predicting dissolved oxygen in intensive aquaculture. Finally, the attention method was implemented to map the weighting and learning parameter matrices, so enabling the BiSRU’s hidden states to be assigned different weights. The findings shown that the presented prediction model can accurately anticipate the fluctuating trend of dissolved oxygen over a 10-day period in just 122 seconds, and the accuracy rate reached 96.28%. Comparing the model effects of LightGBM-BiSRU, LightGBM - GRU, LightGBM-LSTM, and BiSRU - Attention takes the least time. Its higher prediction accuracy can provide an essential reference for intensive aquaculture water quality regulation.

Abstract The pigeon food production industry from breeding to processing into food for market circulation involves many stages and people, which is prone to food safety issues and difficult to regulate. To address these problems, one possible solution is to establish a traceability system. However, in traditional traceability systems, a number of stages involved and each of them provides their own data accumulated in the database. Therefore, complex traceability data are compose of too many stages easily result in confusing information for customers. Besides, centralized data storage makes data vulnerable to be tampered with. To solve these problems, hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) principles have been utilized in our work which is a comprehensive traceability system. In this work, we analyze the pigeon food production industry through HACCP principles and determine some critical control points (CCPs), including incubation, breeding, transportation, slaughtering, processing, and logistics. With the help of these CCPs, we are able to build a traceability system with critical and abundant data but not too complicated for users. To further improve the system, there are different kinds of techniques integrated into it. Firstly, a permissioned blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric, is selected as blockchain module to enhance trustworthiness of data. Secondly, the system contains various IoT devices for automatically collecting environmental parameter data with the aim of reducing human interference. Besides, it is worth mentioning that the proposed information management device can decrease the data entry burden. Consequently, the implementation of the traceability system increase consumers’ confidence in pigeon food production. To summarize, it is a new application of modern agricultural information technique in food safety and a bold experiment in the field of poultry, particularly pigeons.

Accurate counting is difficult in the case of large numbers of overlapping and adhering fry. In this study, we propose a lightweight target detection counting method based on deep learning methods that can meet the deployment requirements of edge computing device for automatic fry counting while obtaining a high counting accuracy. We improve the structure of YOLOv4-tiny by embedding different attention mechanisms in the cross stage partial connections blocks of the backbone network to enhance the feature extraction performance. In addition, the low efficiency of feature fusion in the original model is also addressed by adding different attention mechanisms to the neck network structure to promote the effective fusion of deep feature information with shallow feature information and improve the counting accuracy. The experimental results showed that the six models proposed in this study improved the model accuracy and recall to varying degrees compared with the original YOLOv4-tiny model, while retaining the advantages of the YOLOv4-tiny model in terms of its small number of parameters and fast inference rate. It was also shown that the CBAM(n)-YOLOv4-tiny model obtained by adding the CBAM to the neck network showed the most significant improvement, with an mean average precision (mAP) of 94.45% and a recall of 93.93%. Compared with the YOLOv4-tiny model, there were increases of 27.06% in accuracy, 30.66% in recall, 38.27% in mAP, and 28.77% in the F1-score, along with a 67.82% decrease in LAMR.

Accurately predicting humidity changes in sheep barns is important to ensure the healthy growth of the animals and to improve the economic returns of sheep farming. In this study, to address the limitations of conventional methods in establishing accurate mathematical models of dynamic changes in humidity in sheep barns, we propose a method to predict humidity in sheep barns based on a machine learning model combining a light gradient boosting machine with gray wolf optimization and support-vector regression (LightGBM–CGWO–SVR). Influencing factors with a high contribution to humidity were extracted using LightGBM to reduce the complexity of the model. To avoid the local extremum problem, the CGWO algorithm was used to optimize the required hyperparameters in SVR and determine the optimal hyperparameter combination. The combined algorithm was applied to predict the humidity of an intensive sheep-breeding facility in Manas, Xinjiang, China, in real time for the next 10 min. The experimental results indicated that the proposed LightGBM–CGWO–SVR model outperformed eight existing models used for comparison on all evaluation metrics. It achieved minimum values of 0.0662, 0.2284, 0.0521, and 0.0083 in terms of mean absolute error, root mean square error, mean squared error, and normalized root mean square error, respectively, and a maximum value of 0.9973 in terms of the R2 index.

Too high or too low temperature in the sheep house will directly threaten the healthy growth of sheep. Prediction and early warning of temperature changes is an important measure to ensure the healthy growth of sheep. Aiming at the randomness and empirical problem of parameter selection of the traditional single Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model, this paper proposes an optimization method based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Then, using the proposed PCA-PSO-XGBoost to predict the temperature in the sheep house. First, PCA is used to screen the key influencing factors of the sheep house temperature. The dimension of the input vector of the model is reduced; PSO-XGBoost is used to build a temperature prediction model, and the PSO optimization algorithm selects the main hyperparameters of XGBoost. We carried out a global search and determined the optimal hyperparameters of the XGBoost model through iterative calculation. Using the data of the Xinjiang Manas intensive sheep breeding base to conduct a simulation experiment, the results show that it is different from the existing ones. Compared with the temperature prediction model, the evaluation indicators of the PCA-PSO-XGBoost model proposed in this paper are root mean square error (RMSE), mean square error (MSE), coefficient of determination (R2), mean absolute error (MAE) , which are 0.0433, 0.0019, 0.9995, 0.0065, respectively. RMSE, MSE, and MAE are improved by 68, 90, and 94% compared with the traditional XGBoost model. The experimental results show that the model established in this paper has higher accuracy and better stability, can effectively provide guiding suggestions for monitoring and regulating temperature changes in intensive housing and can be extended to the prediction research of other environmental parameters of other animal houses such as pig houses and cow houses in the future.

Recently, the attention mechanism combining spatial and channel information has been widely used in various deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), proving its great potential in improving model performance. However, this usually uses 2D global pooling operations to compress spatial information or scaling methods to reduce the computational overhead in channel attention. These methods will result in severe information loss. Therefore, we propose a Spatial channel attention mechanism that captures cross-dimensional interaction, which does not involve dimensionality reduction and brings significant performance improvement with negligible computational overhead. The proposed attention mechanism can be seamlessly integrated into any convolutional neural network since it is a lightweight general module. Our method achieves a performance improvement of 2.08% on ResNet and 1.02% on MobileNetV2 in top-one error rate on the ImageNet dataset.