Control of the visual and tactile aspects of poultry food according to the poultry food behavior by image analysis

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.