Fertility Detection of Hatching Eggs Based on a Convolutional Neural Network

In order to achieve the goal of detecting the fertility of hatching eggs which are divided into fertile eggs and dead eggs more accurately and effectively, a novel method combining a convolution neural network (CNN) and a heartbeat signal of the hatching eggs is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we collected heartbeat signals of 9-day-later hatching eggs by the method of PhotoPlethysmoGraphy (PPG), which is a non-invasive method to detect the change of blood volume in living tissues by photoelectric means. Secondly, a sequential convolutional neural network E-CNN, which was used to analyze heartbeat sequence of hatching eggs, was designed. Thirdly, an end-to-end trainable convolutional neural network SR-CNN, which was used to process heartbeat waveform images of hatching eggs, was designed to improve the classification performance in this paper. Key to improving the classification performance of SR-CNN is the SE-Res module, which combines the channel weighting unit “Squeeze-and-Excitation” (SE) block and the residual structure. The experimental results show that two models trained on our dataset, with E-CNN and SR-CNN, are able to achieve the fertility detection of the hatching eggs with superior identification accuarcy, up to 99.50% and 99.62% respectively, on our test set. It is demonstrated that the proposed method is feasible for identifying and classifying the survival of hatching eggs accurately and effectively.