{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,22]],"date-time":"2026-09-22T13:51:46Z","timestamp":1790085106738,"version":"4.0.1"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"15","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,4]],"date-time":"2026-08-04T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1785801600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100012166","name":"National Key Research and Development Program of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["2023YFD1300804-2"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2023YFD1300804-2"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100012166","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Henan Province Foreign Expertise Introduction Program","award":["GZS2024021"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["GZS2024021"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100017700","name":"Key Project of Science and Technology of Henan Province","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["252102110051"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["252102110051"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100017700","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100017700","name":"Key Project of Science and Technology of Henan Province","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["252102110358"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["252102110358"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100017700","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100017700","name":"Key Project of Science and Technology of Henan Province","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["252102110070"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["252102110070"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100017700","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100017700","name":"Key Project of Science and Technology of Henan Province","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["252102110374"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["252102110374"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100017700","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Animals"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Panting is one of the earliest and most prominent behavioral responses of chickens under heat stress. More importantly, panting is inherently a temporally continuous state rather than an instantaneous event. However, existing vision-based methods usually determine panting from beak opening in individual frames, which contradicts the nature of panting and therefore cannot provide reliable assessment. To address this limitation, this study proposes a Cumulative Panting Ratio (CPR), which quantifies sustained open-beak behavior associated with panting by tracking and accumulating instantaneous open-beak events within a temporal sliding window. To support consistent estimation of sustained open-beak behavior and CPR, a cascaded Detection\u2013Tracking\u2013Classification pipeline is constructed to explicitly decouple body-level tracking from fine-grained beak behavior inference, thereby reducing the conflict between global localization and local feature extraction. In addition, a Near-Online Trajectory Stitcher is proposed to reconnect fragmented tracklets using unified temporal, spatial, scale, and directional constraints induced by platform movement. Experiments on practical inspection datasets demonstrated robust tracking continuity and stable quantification performance. Compared with state-of-the-art frameworks, the proposed method reduced identity switches from 10 to 4 and improved IDF1 by 2.43%, while minimizing counting errors across diverse detector architectures. With TensorRT acceleration and multi-stream parallel processing on the Jetson Orin NX, system throughput increased from 7.89 FPS to 51.43 FPS without compromising accuracy. Overall, this work provides a practical solution for quantitative heat stress assessment and supports the deployment of physiological state monitoring systems for precision livestock farming.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/ani16152408","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,4]],"date-time":"2026-08-04T13:42:36Z","timestamp":1785850956000},"page":"2408","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Robust Tracking and Quantification of Open-Beak Behavior for Heat Stress Assessment in Multi-Tier Caged Rearing Broiler Breeders via Mobile Inspection"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"16","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6898-442X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ning","family":"Kong","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Energy and Intelligence Engineering, Henan University of Animal Husbandry and Economy, Zhengzhou 450044, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-5999-9807","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Tongshuai","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Animal Science & Technology, Henan University of Animal Husbandry and Economy, Zhengzhou 450046, China"},{"name":"Henan Engineering Research Center on Animal Healthy Environment and Intelligent Equipment, Zhengzhou 450046, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7624-8051","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Guoming","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Poultry Science, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA"},{"name":"Institute for Artificial Intelligence, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Lei","family":"Xi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Animal Science & Technology, Henan University of Animal Husbandry and Economy, Zhengzhou 450046, China"},{"name":"Henan Engineering Research Center on Animal Healthy Environment and Intelligent Equipment, Zhengzhou 450046, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Shuo","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Engineering, Henan University of Animal Husbandry and Economy, Zhengzhou 450046, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2849-5490","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yuepeng","family":"Shi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Energy and Intelligence Engineering, Henan University of Animal Husbandry and Economy, Zhengzhou 450044, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,4]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"109580","DOI":"10.1016\/j.compag.2024.109580","article-title":"A novel daily behavior recognition model for cage-reared ducks by improving SPPF and C3 of YOLOv5s","volume":"227","author":"Zhang","year":"2024","journal-title":"Comput. 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