close up of young chickens in a commercial poultry house close up of young chickens in a commercial poultry house

Cameras & AI Could Enhance Poultry Welfare & Industry Productivity

Belfast, Northern Ireland

  • Production Systems

Flock weight measurements are an important part of broiler (meat) chicken management systems. This information is used to help decide when to remove chickens from, or depopulate, the house and also to monitor bird health and welfare. Currently, a percentage of the birds are typically weighed manually (e.g. 1% of birds in the house) or using automatic weighing platforms. Manual weighing is labor intensive and may disturb the birds, while differences between birds may not always provide representative weights.

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) and McDonald’s Corporation funded Queen’s University Belfast researchers through the SMART Broiler program to develop FlockFocus, a camera-based technology that tracks activity and estimates chicken weight without manual weighing or using weighing platforms. A March 2025 study in Smart Agriculture Technology (Vol. 10) details their low-cost system using overhead cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically estimate the weight of broiler chickens.

Niamh O’Connell

Accurate, timely and representative information on bird body weight is an important tool for broiler chicken farmers and the broader industry. This publication marks an important step towards a new and feasible way to achieve this.

 Niamh O’Connell
Professor, Queen’s University, Belfast

The SMART Broiler program seeks to transform the welfare and production of broiler chickens through precision monitoring technologies. The Sensors, Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technologies (SMART) solutions augment traditional human observation and subjective scoring with objective real-time monitoring by automating and tracking key welfare indicators — like gait, vocalization and behavior.

The FlockFocus research demonstrates a significant advancement in machine vision technology for the broiler chicken sector. Further refinement is required, but if ultimately widely adopted, this system could improve farm efficiency, provide real-time flock data and help farmers make more informed management decisions. Learn more about the FlockFocus research study.

overhead image of chicken with box, oval and circle drawn around it measuring height and width
A series of 2D features based on the bounding box features were derived from the video sequences to predict the body weight of individual birds.

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Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) builds public-private partnerships to fund bold research addressing big food and agriculture challenges. FFAR was established in the 2014 Farm Bill to increase public agriculture research investments, fill knowledge gaps and complement the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s research agenda. FFAR’s model matches federal funding from Congress with private funding, delivering a powerful return on taxpayer investment. Through collaboration and partnerships, FFAR advances actionable science benefiting farmers, consumers and the environment.

Connect: @FoundationFAR 

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