Application of Genetic Algorithm for Egg Gender Determination

Abstract

Early (Pre-hatch) gender classification of fertilized avian eggs is an important industrial and ethical problem as male chicks are manually identified and terminated after hatching in routine egg production pipeline. The chemical composition of male and female eggs are known to differentiate, yet there is no non-destructive method deployed. We propose to analyze the chemical combination of fertilized eggs by means of Raman spectroscopy. A genetic algorithm based classifier is trained and tested on a sample of 20 eggs. Preliminary results suggest the feasibility of the proposed method in industrial applications.