Abstract:In order to achieve accurate classification of caged laying hens-sounds and intelligent, non-contact detection of laying hens-health, emotion, production status and other information, a caged laying hens-sound classification and recognition method based on improved MobileNetV3 was proposed. The heat stress sound, fright sound, egg-laying sound and singing sound produced by laying hens under cage conditions were collected from Xinhua No.2 laying hens as research object, the one-dimensional sound signals were transformed into three-dimensional Mel-spectrograms after sound pre-processing, and the laying hens’sound data set consisting of 8541 Mel-spectrograms was established. The accuracy of sound classification for caged laying hens was improved by introducing the efficient channel attention (ECA) module in MobileNetV3. The experimental results showed that the MobileNetV3-ECA model achieved 95.25%, 95.16%, 95.02% and 95.08% of accuracy, recall, precision and F1 score, representing an enhancement of 1.99, 2.08, 2.00 and 2.04 percentage points, respectively, in comparison with the original model. Comparing the models with the introduction of coordinate attention (CA) and convolutional block attention module (CBAM) respectively, the accuracy of the model was improved by 2.11 and 2.03 percentage points with the introduction of the ECA module. Significant improvements were also seen in other metrics. The accuracy of MobileNetV3-ECA was improved by 1.99, 2.03 and 2.50 percentage points compared with that of ShuffleNetV2, DesNet121 and EfficientNetV2. The MobileNetV3-ECA based sound classification and recognition method for laying hens proposed provided algorithmic support for automated and intelligent sound detection in the large-scale breeding of laying hens, and also provided a reference for the function optimization of poultry house inspection robots, and opened up a way of thinking for heat stress early warning of large-scale caged laying hens.