Potential application of sound processing techniques for poultry health monitoring

The importance of poultry is undeniable in human food chain and respiratory diseases threaten not only the safety of this food source but also its sufficiency. These threats could be controlled by monitoring system helps farmers and veterinarians to detect any changes in the birds health conditions. There are different sound processing techniques to decompose the target signal and extract appropriate features for detecting these changes. In this paper, a short review of chickens‘ vocalization system, related studies in sound processing field their approaches and their achievements, introduction of a three-step approach for developing suggested algorithm, and a list of challenges facing such research are presented. Regarding the destructive effects of respiratory diseases on bird‘s vocal system, a correlation between audio signal features and the type and severity of avian diseases is predictable. Among sound processing approach and techniques there is good conformity between wavelet transform abilities and the abilities are needed for such health monitoring system. Despite the existence of some challenges, some of which are listed in this paper and none is incredible, sound signal processing techniques can potentially play the role of a diagnosis tool and find valuable information about poultry health condition in the near future.