The feed manufacturers can control the composition of feed in relation to their feed value. But, in practice, an important
issue is still pending: the poultries can reject a batch of feed with optimal nutritional characteristics. This rejection is
often accompanied by undesirable and incomprehensible reactions (e.g. pecks in multiple directions) leading to negative
consequences for the animal as well as the poultry breeder and the firm. Zootechnical studies are dealing with two main
research areas: modeling the poultry feeding behavior and linking it with the poultry perception, especially vision.
Currently, a study is undertaken to define the poultry feeding behavior and to point out feeds corresponding to different
reactions. As for the perception, visual aspects of feed seem to be involved. While the objective of the study is to make it
possible to control the visual quality of feed according to animal behavior, the goal of the present work is to discriminate
between feeds of different firms based on visual features extracted from feed images. This discrimination by visual
features could be linked with the poultry feeding behaviour and be an effective foundation for the control of the feed
acceptability by visual aspects. In this paper, we assess the relevance of color and texture features and we show how
these features are involved in the discrimination process between feed images.
This study tries to connect the poultry food behavior to the visual and tactile characteristics of the food. The aim of the
work is to make it possible to control the visual and tactile aspects of food (food pellets), by means of image analysis.
These aspects are often suspected to explain the undesirable behavior of the poultries, which can reject a food, showing
however optimal nutritional characteristics. These incidents involve important negative consequences as well for the
animal as for the poultry breeder, with a major degradation of the technical and economic performances. Many
zootechnical studies and observations in breeding testify to the sensitivity of the poultries to the visual and tactile aspects
of food, but measurements classically used to characterize them do not allow explaining this phenomenon. Color, texture
and shape features extracted from images of pellets will constitute effective and practical measures to describe their
visual and tactile aspects. We show that a pellets classification based on visual features and supervised by a set of poultry
food behavior labels allows to select a set of discriminating features.
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