An exploratory experiment using temperature drop curve features to identify activity information of duck eggs at mid-incubation.

To address the problem that duck egg mortality is not easily detected at mid-incubation, this paper explored a method to detect mid-incubation egg activity information based on temperature drop curve (TDC) features. In this paper, we used a thermal infrared camera to obtain continuous thermal images of death fertilized duck eggs (DFDE) on the 16th day of incubation and alive fertilized duck eggs (AFDE) hatched for 16-19 days in a 20 °C environment. By observing the temperature drop curve of egg surface, we extracted and visualized five features that could reflect the activity information of duck eggs. And we used K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Naive Bayesian (NB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to establish the activity information detection models for different incubation days. The results showed that KNN could better distinguish the activity of eggs at the 16th and the 17th day of incubation, with F1-score of 85.43% and 85.98%, respectively. The SVM showed better results at the 18th and the 19th day of incubation, with F1-score of 90.57% and 96.3%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrated that the activity detection method based on the temperature drop curve features in this paper could efficiently and nondestructively detect the activity information of mid-incubation duck eggs, which provided a technical foundation for detecting the activity information of duck eggs at mid-incubation.