AI-Driven Bioacoustics in Poultry Farming: A Critical Systematic Review on Vocalization Analysis for Stress and Disease Detection

The fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and acoustic sensing is fundamentally reshaping poultry welfare monitoring by offering unprecedented, non-invasive insights into the emotional, physiological, and behavioral states of birds through vocal analysis. This systematic review delves into the transformative intersection of bioacoustics, machine learning, and animal welfare, meticulously examining the shift from traditional acoustic feature extraction methods, like Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and spectrogram analysis, toward cutting-edge deep learning architectures, such as CNNs, LSTMs, attention mechanisms, and powerful self-supervised models like wav2vec2 and Whisper. Critically, it highlights the evolution toward compact, real-time deployment solutions, including TinyML and edge computing, designed specifically for the dynamic and noisy environments of commercial poultry farms. Emotion recognition, early disease detection, and nuanced behavioral decoding emerge as pivotal application areas, underscoring the immense potential for proactive and responsive livestock management. Furthermore, the review sheds light on emerging open-source toolkits and automated pipelines enhancing dataset preprocessing, annotation accuracy, and robust acoustic inference. Employing advanced bibliometric mapping and thematic clustering, the paper identifies critical gaps in research reproducibility, dataset standardization, and the interpretability of complex AI models. It calls for rigorous advancements in explainable AI methodologies, advocates for greater cross-species generalization of acoustic models, and urges a conscientious approach to ethical AI design. Ultimately, this review underscores the necessity for holistic, interpretable, and ethically informed frameworks, positioning acoustic AI as a transformative force in enhancing animal welfare and operational efficiency within the poultry industry.