'About seven billion male chicks - not wanted for meat or eggs - are killed around the world each year, usually in shredding machines or by gas.' This is really wasteful and cruel.
There are genetic tests that can be done on eggs to sex them. But they are not widespread yet due to the expense and complicated process they require.
In 2018 it was discovered that looking at the blood vessels in human eyes can be used to detect gender. This was not something widely expected by experts in looking at retinal scans. 'gender (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) = 0.97)'.
I think it would be really interesting to make a dataset of chickens eggs, their sex when they hatch, size measurements, weight and photos of the eggs under various types of light. Possibly Infrared is the most useful kind of light. With this it might be possible to make a classifier that can tell you if an egg is likely to be male.
Raspberry pi cameras have advanced a lot recently so making the rig to take these measurements would be much easier than it used to be. Tying these to the eggs eventual gender would at least involve some smart labelling.
Do you know anyone with the necessary chickens and interest to try make up such a dataset?
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