If I may give some dog trainer advice, you are going to spend water and energy making some squirrels just a bit more challenged to the feat, consider just attracting the offending ones to elsewhere where they find some cheap/disposable food source so they let the chicken's alone :-) — this approach is usually cheaper and renders more results with dogs, cats and even chickens themselves! Say, once you detect them, you lure them to a certain path or place, maybe with some LEDs or scent or something you can automate dispensing (I don't known squirrels).

It's it kind of funny... one of the first home-brew CV projects I ever saw was an engineer's system that would unlock the cat flap door when it detected the cat's silhouette. A desirable side effect is that it would not open the door when the cat was carrying a rodent corpse.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080913222639/http://www.quantu...

You might want to take a look at project ELL that runs DNNs on Raspberry pi: https://github.com/Microsoft/ELL

That is awesome!