Sex Detection in the Early Stage of Fertilized Chicken Eggs via Image Recognition
This work addresses a specific ethical and cost problem for industrial hatcheries by enabling early sex detection, though it appears incremental as it builds on known morphological analysis of blood vessels.
The study tackled the ethical and economic issue of culling male chicks in hatcheries by developing a non-invasive method for sex detection in fertilized chicken eggs during the first week of incubation using image recognition of blood vessels, achieving results that address early-stage determination but without specific accuracy numbers provided.
Culling newly hatched male chicks in industrial hatcheries poses a serious ethical problem. Both laying and broiler breeders need males, but it is a problem because they are produced more than needed. Being able to determine the sex of chicks in the egg at the beginning or early stage of incubation can eliminate ethical problems as well as many additional costs. When we look at the literature, the methods used are very costly, low in applicability, invasive, inadequate in accuracy, or too late to eliminate ethical problems. Considering the embryo's development, the earliest observed candidate feature for sex determination is blood vessels. Detection from blood vessels can eliminate ethical issues, and these vessels can be seen when light is shined into the egg until the first seven days. In this study, sex determination was made by morphological analysis from embryonic vascular images obtained in the first week when the light was shined into the egg using a standard camera without any invasive procedure to the egg.