A Multi-Feature Fusion Based on Transfer Learning for Chicken Embryo Eggs Classification

Abstract

The fertility detection of Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) chicken embryo eggs in vaccine preparation is a challenging task due to the high similarity among six kinds of hatching embryos (weak, hemolytic, crack, infected, infertile, and fertile). This paper firstly analyzes two classification difficulties of feature similarity with subtle variations on six kinds of five- to seven-day embryos, and proposes a novel multi-feature fusion based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) architecture in a small dataset. To avoid overfitting, data augmentation is employed to generate enough training images after the Region of Interest (ROI) of original images are cropped. Then, all the augmented ROI images are fed into pretrained AlexNet and GoogLeNet to learn the discriminative deep features by transfer learning, respectively. After the local features of Speeded Up Robust Feature (SURF) and Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) are extracted, the multi-feature fusion with deep features and local features is implemented. Finally, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) is trained with the fused features. The verified experiments show that this proposed method achieves an average classification accuracy rate of 98.4%, and that the proposed transfer learning has superior generalization and better classification performance for small-scale agricultural image samples.