A Non-Destructive Early Sex Identification Method for Chicken Embryos Based on Improved MobileViT-V3

The global poultry hatching industry faces severe challenges of resource waste and animal ethics issues due to the routine culling of day-old male chicks. Meanwhile, early sex identification of 4-day-incubated chicken embryos is limited by low accuracy, as embryos at this stage have weak, low-contrast blood vessels that are highly susceptible to interference from the eggshell’s texture. To address these issues, this paper proposes a non-destructive early sex identification method for chicken embryos based on an improved MobileViT-V3 model. Taking the lightweight hybrid architecture MobileViT-V3 as the backbone, we embedded a Micro Feature Enhancement module (MFE-Module) in Stage 3 to strengthen the extraction of fine vascular details, and a Multi-Scale Adaptive Attention Fusion module (MSAAF-Module) in Stage 4 to realize adaptive weighted screening of multi-source features. Experiments on the self-constructed dataset of 4-day-incubated embryos show that the improved model achieves a test set classification accuracy of 92.26%, with an F1-score of 92.15%, a recall rate of 92.12%, and a Kappa coefficient of 0.845. It outperforms mainstream models such as YOLOv12, ShuffleNetV2, ConvNeXt-T, ResNet, and Swin-ViT, with only 2.98 M parameters and an inference speed of 97.6 FPS, well exceeding the 30 FPS real-time requirement of industrial sorting lines and showing high potential for practical industrial deployment. This method provides a new scheme for non-destructive, high-precision, and high-efficiency early sex identification in poultry hatching.