Non-Destructive Early Sex Identification of Embryonated Quail Eggs Using Raman Spectroscopy

Routine culling of day-old male chicks in the global poultry industry triggers severe resource waste and critical animal welfare crises, while non-destructive early sex identification techniques for embryonated quail eggs remain a prominent research gap. This study developed a novel Raman spectroscopy-based method for quail embryo sexing on incubation day 5, using an innovative "shell perforation without inner membrane damage" sampling strategy. The optimized GA-CARS-ELM model achieved 80.95% accuracy on the independent test set with 0.39 ms single-sample model inference time and 5.3 ± 0.5 min total per-egg processing time under manual operation, outperforming mainstream machine learning and deep learning algorithms. This work fills the relevant research gap and provides vital technical support for the development of automated pre-hatching sex sorting systems in poultry farming.