Egg counting in a poultry farm: 14 production units, 114 cameras and 207 counting zones

Summary

Client. A large producer of chicken eggs. The company’s production facilities occupy 15,000 m². The company employs more than a thousand people.

Task. Implement egg counting with video cameras in 14 production halls.

Result. The CamContador counter is successfully working. The counting accuracy is 99.90-99.93%.

Situation

Birds at the factory are housed in tiered cage batteries. Usually there are 7-8 batteries in the workshops. Each unit collects a certain number of eggs per day.

Monitoring the egg production of the batteries helps to draw the right conclusions to evaluate the performance of the factory. For example:

If you change the diet in one battery and leave it the same in the others, you can estimate the effect of feed on egg production by the number of eggs collected. And make a decision about its adjustment.

If, for no apparent reason, one battery has fewer eggs than the others, the housing conditions may have deteriorated and it’s time to check the equipment. Maybe the water drinker is clogged or the lighting in the workshop is broken.

In order to conduct such experiments, it is necessary to count the number of eggs at each stage of production and for each battery. To do this, a technical solution is needed to measure all the indicators: the production flow entering the plant, the number of eggs produced in the batteries and the output flow.

Often, special counters installed on the equipment are used for such counting. However, according to our data, the CamContador egg counting technology is many times cheaper, and its accuracy matches that of hardware counters. There is no need to buy expensive specialized equipment – you only need video cameras and a computer. The guaranteed accuracy of the egg counter is specified in the contract and is not less than 99.8%.

Having agreed with the above arguments, the factory management chose the CamContador video counter.

The challenge

The client has set the task of implementing egg counting in 13 workshops. Each hall should have between 15 and 18 counting areas. The counting areas include the eggs entering and leaving the production units, as well as the left and right side of the cage batteries where the eggs enter the conveyor belt.

The math is simple. The input stream and the eggs from all the batteries should add up to give the output stream of the shop.