Noninvasive in ovo sexing in Korat chicken by pattern recognition of its embryologic vasculature

Generally, chick sexing either involves feather, color, and vent sexing in 1-day old chicks, or analyzing biochemical contents or spectroscopic patterns in a developing embryo. While the former requires skilled examiners or anesthesia and surgery, the latter often have to precisely make a small hole in an eggshell. To resolve these issues, this paper proposes a non-invasive technique that focuses on the phenotypic differences. Chorioallantoic maturation and vascular anastomosis were characterized and discerned between sexes. The appearance of embryologic vasculature was represented by the entropy of its multiband visual features, extracted from a candled egg. The experiments showed that the method could classify embryo's sex, based on these features, with accuracy, precision, recall, and balanced accuracy of 83.33 %, 84.62 %, 73.33 %, and 81.90 %, respectively. Moreover, false discovery and false omission rates, which reflect practical errors, were 15.38 % and 17.39 %, respectively.