Scientists develop AI that can gauge distress signals of baby chickens

Scientists have developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can automatically identify and count distress signals of chickens. They say that the new technology can be made available within five years so that farmers can save the lives of these birds.

Researchers claim that the AI, which detects and quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, can correctly distinguish distress calls from other barn noises with 97 per cent accuracy.

In their early life, chicks utter distress calls—high-pitched, repetitive chirps—to attract the mother hen’s attention for food or in distress. But in a commercial chicken farm, it can be difficult to pick up when they’re uncomfortable, socially isolated, or hungry. Answering these calls can be the difference between life and death.

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To improve these efforts, researchers at the City University of Hong Kong recorded the vocalisations of chickens housed at Lingfeng Poultry Ltd., a major poultry producer in China’s Guangxi province.

The birds were kept in stacked cages (three cages per stack, and 13 to 20 individuals per cage), with about 2000 to 2500 chickens in each barn.

Over the course of a year, the researchers recorded the environment, picking up everything from natural farm sounds such as workers hosing down barn floors to the chick distress calls.

They then transformed all of these noises into sound pictures known as spectrograms and used the images to train a type of AI program called deep learning.

“Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others, and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call,” The Guardian quoted Alan McElligott, an associate professor of animal behaviour and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong.

“Even to the untrained ear, it’s not too difficult to pick them out.”

(With inputs from agencies)

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