An IoT-Based Breeding Egg Identification and Coding System for Selection of High-Quality Breeding Geese

SIMPLE SUMMARY: In the process of breeding geese, manually recording data causes the problems of missing and confusing characterization data; furthermore, manual intervention can lead to the stress response of breeding geese and affect the laying efficiency of breeding geese. In this study, we tried to combine the Internet of things and computer image technology to improve the accuracy of data recording, so as to achieve an accurate correspondence between breeding goose individual data and egg-laying data. Therefore, we developed and tested a breeding egg identification and coding system to realize the selection of high-quality breeding geese. The test results showed that the system realized a correspondence of 97.8% between breeding goose individual data and egg-laying data. The system realized the information recording of breeding geese under nonmanual intervention, realized the correspondence between individual data and egg-laying data, and improved the health and welfare of breeding geese. ABSTRACT: The selection of breeding geese requires the recording of egg production information to correspond to the identity of the breeding geese. However, due to the special physiological characteristics of breeding geese, manual recording in practice can affect the egg-laying performance of breeding geese and can also lead to problems of missing and confusing individual breeding goose data with the number of eggs laid by the geese. For contactless recording of breeding goose identity and egg production information for high-quality breeding, this paper proposes an Internet of things (IoT)-based breeding egg identification and coding method for the selection of high-quality breeding geese. At the sensing level, we deployed a radiofrequency identification (RFID)-based sensor. Each breeding goose wore a foot ring RFID tag on its leg, and the individual information was read by foot ring RFID readers placed at the bottom of the devices. Individual information was uploaded to the cloud server for database management through structured query language (MySQL). The target detection modules were mounted on top of the devices, and the breeding geese and eggs were detected in the delivery rooms by an improved single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) target detection algorithm. The egg body limit transmission device and contactless coding device were activated only in the case of breeding eggs, and the breeding goose information was printed on the egg bodies in the form of quick response codes (QR codes), which enabled the breeding egg information to correspond with the breeding goose information. An evaluative experiment was performed using a system for the selection of high-quality breeding geese, with web cameras and a cloud monitoring platform. The breeding geese were allowed 14 days to become accustomed to the experimental environment before monitoring began. The evaluative experiment results showed that the pass rate of egg body coding reached 98.25%, the improved SSD algorithm was 8.65% more accurate and 62.6 ms faster than traditional SSD, and the accuracy rate corresponding to the individual information of the breeding geese and the surface information of the goose eggs was 97.8%. The experimental results met the requirements of accurate marking of individual information of breeding geese, which can provide technical support for the selection of high-quality breeding geese.