{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,23]],"date-time":"2026-02-23T12:17:11Z","timestamp":1771849031747,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":40,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"4","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,21]],"date-time":"2026-02-21T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1771632000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Fujian Provincial Individual Science & Technology Commissioner Project","award":["202435080017"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["202435080017"]}]},{"name":"Fujian Provincial Team Science & Technology Commissioner Project","award":["2024T3508024"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2024T3508024"]}]},{"name":"College Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program, China","award":["202510564036"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["202510564036"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Animals"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The Liancheng White Duck is a nationally protected breed in China, but its high-density farming environment poses significant challenges for target detection and behavior recognition, particularly due to occlusion, motion blur, and flock aggregation, making practical flock monitoring and counting labor intensive and prone to error in real barns. To address these issues, we propose DenseDuckMOT, an integrated detection-tracking framework for practical farm monitoring using existing fixed surveillance cameras with minimal additional hardware cost that combines the improved DuckNet detector with the AKFTrack tracker. DuckNet, based on YOLOv11, incorporates BiFPN, GLSA, and ESDH. It achieves high performance with 98.19% precision, 94.79% mAP@0.75, 97.70% F1-score, and 97.72% recall, while maintaining a lightweight design of only 1.90M parameters and a model size of 4485 KB. AKFTrack introduces adaptive Kalman prediction and a two-stage association scheme. It is evaluated on five dense white duck surveillance videos, where it outperforms or ranks second in MOTA, IDF1, and recall compared to DeepSORT, StrongSORT, and ByteTrack, especially in crowded and occluded scenes. Experimental results, ablation studies, and LayerCAM visualizations confirm the complementary advantages of BiFPN, GLSA, and ESDH, as well as the robustness of AKFTrack in handling occlusion and rapid motion. DenseDuckMOT provides accurate, efficient, and stable real-time monitoring in dynamic poultry farms, offering a scalable solution for intelligent farming.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/ani16040684","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,23]],"date-time":"2026-02-23T11:39:10Z","timestamp":1771846750000},"page":"684","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["DenseDuckMOT: A Real-Time Detection-Tracking Coupled Counting Framework for Complex Avicultural Environments"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Jiaxing","family":"Xie","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"},{"name":"Engineering Research Center for Monitoring Agricultural information of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jiatao","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Liye","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yue","family":"Cao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Zihao","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Meiyi","family":"Lu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yujian","family":"Lin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Chunxi","family":"Tu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering (College of Artificial Intelligence), South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7373-7626","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Weixing","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Zhujiang College, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510900, China"},{"name":"Guangdong Engineering Technology Research Center for Artificial Intelligence Empowered Media Technologies and Applications, Guangzhou 510900, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jinshui","family":"Lin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Liancheng County White Duck Genetic Resource Farm, Longyan 366200, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"331","DOI":"10.1016\/S0921-8009(03)00088-0","article-title":"Animal Genetic Resources and Sustainable Livelihoods","volume":"45","author":"Anderson","year":"2003","journal-title":"Ecol. 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