Abstract
Identifying chicken breast freshness is an important component of poultry food safety. Traditional methods for chicken breast freshness recognition suffer from issues such as high cost, difficulty in recognition, and low efficiency. In this study, the YOLOv8n_CA_DSC3 algorithm is employed for non-destructive recognition of chicken breast freshness. Specifically, chicken breast samples under different lighting intensities, densities, sampling angles, etc., were collected. Based on the total microbial count (TAC), coliform count (ANC), and pH value of the samples, the freshness of chicken breast is classified into 7 levels: fresh meat, slightly fresh meat 1, slightly fresh meat 2, slightly fresh meat 3, spoiled meat 1, spoiled meat 2, and spoiled meat 3. The dataset was augmented with eight types of data enhancement, resulting in 34,380 samples. The CONV convolutional layers were replaced with the deformable convolution DCNv3 modules to improve network efficiency and key feature extraction of chicken breast through long-range dependencies, adaptive spatial aggregation, and sparse sampling, thereby enhancing algorithm generalization performance. The introduction of the CA attention mechanism module enhances feature fusion between multiple channels and long-distance high-level and low-level data dependencies. Experimental results show that in the improved algorithm, YOLOv8n_CA_DSC3 achieves suboptimal recall rate but optimal precision, average precision at IoU = 0.5, and average precision at IoU = 0.5:0.95. The accuracy of chicken breast freshness recognition is 95.6%, average precision at IoU = 0.5 is 97.5%, and average precision at IoU = 0.5:0.95 is 77.5%, representing improvements of 5.3%, 5.1%, and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the original YOLOv8n. In conclusion, the YOLOv8n_CA_DSC3 algorithm demonstrates good performance in feature extraction and integration of upper and lower layer information for chicken breast freshness, exhibiting high robustness and providing technical support for non-destructive recognition of chicken breast freshness and food safety.