Deep Learning-Based Gender Recognition in Cherry Valley Ducks Through Sound Analysis

Gender recognition is an important part of the duck industry. Currently, the gender identification of ducks mainly relies on manual labor, which is highly labor-intensive. This study aims to propose a novel method for distinguishing between males and females based on the characteristic sound parameters for day-old ducks. The effective data from the sounds of day-old ducks were recorded and extracted using the endpoint detection method. The 12-dimensional Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) with first-order and second-order difference coefficients in the effective sound signals of the ducks were calculated, and a total of 36-dimensional feature vectors were obtained. These data were used as input information to train three classification models, include a backpropagation neural network (BPNN), a deep neural network (DNN), and a convolutional neural network (CNN). The training results show that the accuracies of the BPNN, DNN, and CNN were 83.87%, 83.94%, and 84.15%, respectively, and that the three classification models could identify the sounds of male and female ducks. The prediction results showed that the prediction accuracies of the BPNN, DNN, and CNN were 93.33%, 91.67%, and 95.0%, respectively, which shows that the scheme for distinguishing between male and female ducks via sound had high accuracy. Moreover, the CNN demonstrated the best recognition effect. The method proposed in this study can provide some support for developing an efficient technique for gender identification in duck production.