Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 157 (2019) 471–478

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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compag

Original papers

Identification of unfertilized duck eggs before hatching using visible/near T

infrared transmittance spectroscopy
Jun Donga, Xiaoguang Donga, Yanlei Lia, Yankun Penga, Kuanglin Chaob, Cuiying Gaoc,
Xiuying Tanga,
⁎

a
China Agricultural University, College of Engineering, 17 Qinghua East Road, Haidian, Beijing 100083, China
b
USDA-ARS Environmental Microbial and Food Safety Laboratory, Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Beltsville, MD 20705, United States
c
Inner Mongolia Saifeiya Agricultural Science and Technology Development Co., Ltd., Xizi Town, Ningcheng County, Chifeng City, Mongolia Interior 024207, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Identification of unfertilized duck eggs before hatching was hardly achieved in the poultry farm by the traditional
Unfertilized egg method. Visible/near infrared (VIS/NIR) transmittance spectroscopy was used as a rapid and non-destructive tech-
Duck nique to distinguish the unfertilized duck eggs before hatching. Transmittance spectral data of duck eggs laid by the
Before hatching same flock of ducks was obtained. Prediction models were developed and used to link the non-destructive assessment
Naive Bayes
methods and qualitative observation values of spectral with the spectral data. Established models were validated by
Visible/near infrared transmittance
spectroscopy
the internal leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) and external validation. The prediction model established by
standard normal variate (SNV) pre-processing method and naive Bayes (NB) modeling method got the best perfor-
mance. The overall prediction accuracy of the validation set was 94.54% and the prediction accuracy of internal
validation was 95.06%. The prediction accuracy of 667 duck eggs by means of NB modeling method by SNV pre-
processing was 94.77%. Results showed that the VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy was an effective tool for de-
tecting the unfertilized duck eggs. This provided technical support for identification of the unfertilized duck eggs.

1. Introduction
For the poultry farm, identifying the unfertilized duck eggs before
hatching is important and hard work because it is hardly achieved by
the traditional candling method. The traditional candling method,
widely used to assess flock fertility of hatching duck eggs and dead
embryos, is labor consuming, subjective and artificial (Liu and Ngadi,
2013). In addition, the unfertilized duck eggs not picked out before
hatching will occupy hatching space and turn sour quickly during
hatching. The spoiled unfertilized duck eggs burst easily and produced
bacteria, which infect the surrounding eggs. Therefore, it is of im-
portance to use a non-destructive and accurate method to detect the
unfertilized duck eggs before hatching for poultry farms.
In recent years, researchers have focused on identifying the fertilized
chicken eggs incubated for 2–5 days by machine vision (Das and Evans,
1992a,b), acoustic sensors (Zhang et al., 2012), near/infrared hyper-
spectral imaging (Liu and Ngadi, 2013; Zhang et al., 2014), thermal
imaging (Lin et al., 2013), temperature sensors (Tong et al., 2016) and
VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy (Qin et al., 2017). These methods
could achieve high accuracy. However, these hatching eggs identification
methods were concentrated on the mid-term hatching, and the picked
chicken eggs lost economic value, which resulted in a great waste. Al-
though researchers used near/infrared reflectance spectroscopy (Zhu
et al., 2012) and hyperspectral imaging (Zhu et al., 2015) to detect un-
fertilized eggs before hatching, complex detection method and expensive
detection cost was not conducive to industrial application.
Compared with identification of unfertilized chicken eggs from
fertilized ones, detection of unfertilized duck eggs from fertilized ones
before hatching has received little attention. Detective methods and
qualitative models of chicken eggs are not suitable for the duck eggs, on
account of the detection technology and the differences in physiology
and inside content between chicken and duck eggs. In addition, there is
little research so far on identification of unfertilized duck eggs before
hatching based on VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy.
Nowadays, VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy as a rapid and non-
destructive detection method was used for predicting eggs freshness
and albumen quality (Abdel-Nour et al., 2011), detecting unfertilized
eggs containing blood spots (Brant et al., 1953), and monitoring
chicken eggs embryo development (Kemps et al., 2010). The above
studies by VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy indicated that trans-
mittance light could penetrate whole egg and the transmittance mea-
surements were preferable to reflectance measurements acquiring

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: txying@cau.edu.cn (X. Tang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2019.01.021
Received 12 November 2018; Received in revised form 7 January 2019; Accepted 18 January 2019
0168-1699/ © 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.
J. Dong et al.
information of internal qualities for detection the unfertilized eggs
(Kimura et al., 2015), the obtained spectra could carry large amounts of
internal information of egg.
In this study, VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy was used to
identify unfertilized duck eggs before hatching. The main objectives of
this present research were: (1) to build a VIS/NIR transmittance spec-
troscopy system in the spectral wavelength range of 330–1030 nm to
obtain transmittance spectra of duck eggs before hatching; (2) to study
whether spectral pre-processing methods can improve the prediction
accuracy of models; (3) to build robust naive Bayes (NB) models upon
the qualitative relationship between the spectral data and qualitative
observation values of duck eggs; (4) to validate the predictive ability of
the optimum model to predict duck eggs.
2. Material and methods
2.1. Sample preparation
A total of 890 Cherry Valley Duck eggs were used in this experiment,
among which 223 duck eggs were used to establish prediction models
and 667 eggs were applied to validate the optimum prediction model.
Eggs were collected from ducks which were fed in the same environment
from a poultry farm named Inner Mongolia Saifeiya Agricultural Science
and Technology Development Co., Ltd in Inner Mongolia, China. The size
and color of all duck eggs were nearly consistent. There were pollutants,
such as feces and soil, on the eggshell of duck eggs after oviposition due
to the feeding. In order to prevent the mildew and increase the perme-
ability of duck eggs during hatching, duck eggs were rinsed by for-
maldehyde fumigation before hatching. So, the eggs after 24 h of ovi-
position were stored under the controlled condition at 18 °C, and the eggs
were not cleaned and disinfected. Duck eggs were wiped by alcohol with
the content of 75% and were dried naturally. All samples were randomly
taken out for VIS/NIR spectral data acquisition in one day.
2.2. Experiment equipment and spectral data acquisition
Fig. 1 showed the experiment equipment used for VIS/NIR trans-
mittance spectral measurements. VIS/NIR transmittance data of each
duck egg was collected by a spectrometer (USB2000+, Ocean Optics
Inc., USA). The spectrometer measured transmittance at wavelengths
Fig. 1. The experiment equipment of VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy.
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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 157 (2019) 471–478
ranging from 330 to 1030 nm with a 0.38 nm increment. Two halogen
lamps, 20 w each, were placed underneath the egg. The lamps were used
as light source and turned on for half an hour before spectral measure-
ment. Temperature sensor was installed at the bottom of the loading
table to ensure that temperature of the duck egg was below 38 °C. A
fiber-optics was placed above the egg and fixed on a lift table. The dis-
tance from the fiber-optics probe to the experimental duck egg was ap-
proximately 20 mm. Spectral data of duck egg was obtained by averaging
three measurements and the acquisition time was 600 ms. The detection
number was written on the pallet according to the detection order after
the VIS/NIR transmittance spectroscopy measurement.
2.3. Acquisition of spectral qualitative observation values
Duck eggs were put into an incubator at 37.8 °C and 65% relative
humidity with blunt end upwards. After hatching for seven days, the
candling method was applied to distinguish unfertilized duck eggs. The
unfertilized duck eggs, which could not be identified by the candling
method, would be broken artificially to observe the embryo development.
At the same time, the spectral qualitative observation values of fertilized
duck eggs and unfertilized ones were set to 1 and 0, respectively.
2.4. Detection of outlier
Outliers are indicative of atypical phenomena. Outliers produce due
to the uncontrolled process, wrong analytical technique, contamination
during the preparation of the sample, sample inhomogeneity and
measurements with a high systematic error (Oliveira et al., 2010).
Outliers can affect prediction accuracies of models. Therefore, Maha-
lanobis Distance (MD) and Leverage Diagnostic (LD) were used to
identify and eliminate outliers.
2.5. Spectral data pre-processing
Different mathematical pre-processing methods were adopted to
preprocess raw data for reserving the undesirable variations and
leaving the useful information. Savitzky–Golay (S-G) smoothing and
standard normal variate (SNV) were applied to improve the predictive
ability of models. S-G method was for removing high frequency noise,
improving signal to noise ratio (SNR) of spectral curves, and preserving
J. Dong et al.
the important information maximally (Vidal and Amigo, 2012). SNV
method could correct the effects of different scattering characteristics
from unknown samples by normalizing the spectra individually
(Luypaert et al., 2005). Effects of different pre-processing methods were
determined by comparing the prediction accuracy of different models
relating the pre-processing spectra. However, it was worth investigating
whether the two pre-processing methods could eliminate the effects of
noise and improve the robustness of models.
2.6. Modeling and validation methods
VIS/NIR spectral data was linked to spectral qualitative observation
values of fertilized duck eggs and unfertilized duck eggs with 0 and 1
for building prediction models. With the purpose of evaluating the
performance of models and obtaining the optimal model, cross-valida-
tion methods of leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) and external
validation methods were used.
2.6.1. Leave-one-out cross-validation
The internal LOOCV method was used to select the optimum cali-
bration set and pre-processing methods. The principle of LOOCV was
using one sample spectral data from the original dataset as the vali-
dation set, and the remaining sample data as the calibration set. This is
repeated in such a way that each sample spectral data is used once as
the validation set, and and the prediction accuracy is calculated for
each time (Joshi et al., 2012). Finally, the average value of predictive
accuracy by the LOOCV was calculated and used as the evaluating in-
dicator.
2.6.2. Naïve Bayes classifier
Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier was applied to build calibration model.
Discriminant values of model were calculated and compared with
spectral qualitative observation of 1 and 0, for determining the final
predictive accuracy. NB classifier, a statistical learning algorithm,
performs probabilistic classification based on Bayesian networks
(Kotsiantis, 2007). The formulae was as follow:
P (x / wi ) P (wi )
p(wi /x ) =
p (x ) (1)
where x was the spectral data, wi was the category of the fertilized duck
eggs or the unfertilized ones, p (wi ) was the prior probability, p(x /wi)
was the class conditional density, and p(wi/x ) was the posterior prob-
ability (Joshi et al., 2012).
The p (x ) works as a scale factor that guarantees that the posterior
probabilities sum up to unity, and as all good probabilities must. For a
two-category classification, p (x ) is given by the Eq. (2).
2
p(x ) = p (x / wj ) P (wj )
j =1 (2)
For any observation, the probability of a category is given by Eq.
(3).
P (w1/x ), if we decide w2,
P(error/ x ) =
P (w2 /x ), if we decide w1, (3)
So, Bayes Decision Rule decides w1 if P (w1/ x ) > P (w2/ x ); otherwise
decide w2 (Joshi et al., 2012).
2.6.3. Evaluation parameters of models
The developed model with raw spectral data was regarded as NB,
and the models with a series of pre-processing methods were named as
NB-1, NB-2…NB-n (n = 1, 2, 3…). To obtain optimum model, the
predictive ability of each model was evaluated by the following para-
meters (Zhang et al., 2017): the all prediction accuracy (Q (Eq. (4)));
sensitivity (SE (Eq. (5)), the prediction accuracy for the fertilized duck
eggs); specificity (SP (Eq. (6)), the prediction accuracy for the
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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 157 (2019) 471–478
unfertilized duck eggs); positive predictive value (PPV (Eq. (7))); ne-
gative predictive value (NPV (Eq. (8)))
TP + TN
Q=
(4)
TP + TN + FP + FN
SE =
TP
TP + FN (5)
TN
SP =
TN + FP (6)
TP
PPV =
TP + FP (7)
TN
NPV =
(8)
TN + FN
where TP (true positives) is the fertilized duck eggs that are correctly
recognized; TN (true negatives) is the unfertilized duck eggs that are
correctly identified; FP (false positive) is the fertilized duck eggs are
wrongly predicted as the unfertilized ones; FN (false negative) is the
unfertilized duck eggs are wrongly predicted as the fertilized ones.
These parameters are also widely applied to evaluate the accuracy of
models, and the higher parameters values, the better accuracy of pre-
diction models.
3. Results and discussions
3.1. Selection and analysis of spectral information
The transmittance spectral measurements from 330 to 500 nm as
well as from 940 to 1030 nm could convey little characteristic ab-
sorption and low signal-to-noise. And eggshell could absorb spectral
information of less than 500 nm (Brant et al., 1953). So the spectral
data from 330 to 500 nm as well as from 940 to 1030 nm were not
recommended for establishing calibration models, and the spectral data
from 500 to 940 nm were used for further analysis. The average VIS/
NIR spectral response of fertilized duck eggs and unfertilized ones be-
fore hatching were illustrated in Fig. 2. Although the VIS/NIR spectra
information had a similar trend, there were differences in the trans-
mittance values of duck eggs as a function of the fertility or infertility
throughout whole spectral range. It was observed that the unfertilized
duck eggs had higher absorbance values than the fertilized ones, which
provided a mathematical basis for discriminating duck eggs. In addi-
tion, fertility occured prior to the formation of the eggshell, and the
fertilized eggs had generated development zone in the yolk (Steiner
et al., 2011), which were different from the unfertilized eggs. Differ-
ences of biotic component between the fertilized and unfertilized duck
eggs lead to the differences in VIS/NIR spectral data. Although, denti-
fication of fertility and infertility of duck eggs involves many compli-
cated parameters, they could be predicted using VIS/NIR spectral re-
sponse from 500 nm to 940 nm.
3.2. Analysis and elimination of outlier
After selecting the related spectral waveband and different pre-
processing methods, a total of 223 duck eggs were randomly divided on
a scale of 3:1 into two groups including the calibration set with 168
samples and the validation set with 55 samples. The numbers of duck
eggs in the calibration and validation set were showed in Table 1.
Spectra data of duck eggs without the eliminated samples was set as
the X matrix and the spectral observation qualitative values were set as
Y matrix. All spectral calculations were operated by the Matlab soft-
ware (Version 5.3, The MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA). LD and MD
methods were applied to detect outlier in the calibration set before the
calibration set was used to establish a qualitative calibration model.
It could be seen that from Fig. 3, threshold value with 0.07 of LD
method was calculated by three times of all samples leverage values,
J. Dong et al.
Fig. 2. Original average VIS/NIR transmittance spectra of fertilized duck eggs and unfertilized ones.
Table 1
The number of duck eggs in the calibration and validation sets.
Subsets Fertilized duck eggs Unfertilized duck eggs
Calibration set 76 92
Validation set 25 30
Total 101 122
and it was represented by a curve to distinguish outlier from normal
data. Data point (one point represents one sample) of numbered 84, 57,
92 and 141 those were above the threshold line, which indicated that
the corresponding sample was noticeably different from the other
samples (Wu et al., 2017), and spectral data of sample was eliminated
as an outlier and excluded from the dataset. LD values of these ab-
normal samples were showed in Table 2.
Only one method may not identify the true outliers (Alameddine
et al., 2010). MD method was also used for outlier detection in the
calibration set. From Fig. 4, threshold value with 10.48 of MD method
was calculated by three percent of number of all samples, which was
represented by a curve to distinguish outlier from normal data. Data
point (one point represents one sample) of samples numbed 81, 83, 84,
57, 92 and 141 above the line were treat as outliers and the corre-
sponding spectral data were removed from dataset. MD values for these
outliers were showed in Table 2.
With the purpose of evaluating real outlier, LOOCV was applied to
validate the influence of outliers for calibration sets by prediction ac-
curacy. Results of the LOOCV validation without the outliers were
showed in Table 3.
The prediction accuracy of calibration model calculated by all
sample data without the outliers was 82.74%. It could be seen from the
Table 2, LD values of samples numbered 84 with 0.07 and numbered 57
with 0.11 approached to threshold value with 0.07. In order to decide
whether samples numbered 84 and 57 were outliers of calibration set,
LOOCV was applied to recognize outliers. The prediction accuracy of
eliminating the unfertilized duck eggs from all the duck eggs without
the two samples numbered 84 and 57 decreased from 82.74% to
82.53%. That which one of samples numbered 84 and 57 was outlier
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 157 (2019) 471–478
could not be decided. The discrimination accuracy after the elimination
of samples numbered 84, 57, 92 and 141 was 82.93%, which was
Total higher than that of raw spectral data and after elimination of samples
numbered 84 and 57. So, spectral data of samples numbered 84, 57, 92
168 and 141 were eliminated as outliers. As could be seen from Table 2, MD
55
values of samples numbered 81 with 10.92 and numbered 83 with
223
11.48 were close to threshold value with 10.08, which meant that the
two samples numbered 81 and 83 could not be confirmed as outliers.
The prediction accuracy without samples numbered 81 and 83 in-
creased from 82.74% to 82.92%, which represented that the two sam-
ples would affect the prediction of calibration set.
The prediction accuracy without numbered 57, 81, 83, 84, 92 and
141 was 83.33%, which was higher than that by LD. Therefore, samples
81, 83, 84, 57, 92 and 141 were determined as outliers and eliminated.
Predictive ability of calibration set was improved greatly by using MD
than LD.
3.3. Analysis of internal and external validation of the Naïve Bayes
prediction models
3.3.1. Analysis of internal cross validation of leave-one-out
After selecting the related spectral waveband, eliminating outliers
and different pre-processing, calibration set was applied to establish a
qualitative calibration model, and LOOCV as internal validation
method was used to evaluate predictive ability before the external va-
lidation. The effects of different pre-processing methods should be
taken into consideration in establishing models before evaluating cali-
bration set.
VIS/NIR spectral data of 163 duck eggs by different pre-processing
methods linked with the spectral qualitative observation values of fer-
tilized duck eggs and unfertilized ones with 1 and 0 were evaluated by
LOOCV method. And a total of 163 calibration models were obtained by
LOOCV method in accordance with 163 prediction accuracy values.
Calibration set was evaluated by the average prediction accuracy,
which was calculated by the 163 prediction accuracy values. The
average prediction accuracies of LOOCV with raw VIS/NIR spectral
data, S-G and SNV preprocessing were 83.33%, 86.42% and 95.06%,
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J. Dong et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 157 (2019) 471–478

Fig. 3. Elimination of Outliers by LD method for calibration set.

Table 2
LD and MD values of outliers.
Number of samples Values of LD Values of MD
57 0.11 18.05
81 – 10.92
83 – 11.48
84 0.07 12.01
92 0.12 22.23
141 0.14 23.81
LD, Leverage Diagnostic; MD, Mahalanobis Distance.
respectively. In contrast to the raw VIS/NIR spectral data, prediction
accuracies were improved with appropriate pre-processing methods,
which showed that pre-processing methods could reduce the undesir-
able variables and leave the useful information. The prediction ac-
curacies by raw VIS/NIR spectral data and S-G method were lower than
that by SNV method, which illustrated that SNV preprocessing method
was more suitable for modeling between VIS/NIR spectral data of duck
eggs and spectral qualitative values with large information. Obviously,
the above results confirmed that appropriate pre-processing method
was an important and a good strategy to avoid the inclusion of in-
formation for the calibration set.
3.3.2. Analysis of external validation of Naïve Bayes prediction models
NB method combined with different pre-processing methods was ap-
plied to establish prediction model between VIS/NIR spectral data of cali-
bration set and spectral qualitative observation values of fertilized duck eggs
and unfertilized ones with 1, 0, respectively. Validation set as external va-
lidation tool was used for evaluating predictive ability and reliability of a
classification model. The prediction accuracies of internal and external va-
lidation models were compared to obtain the optimum prediction model.
To further analyze the predictive ability of prediction models, the
indicators values of the all prediction accuracy(Q), sensitivity(SE),
specificity(SP), positive predictive value(PPV) and negative predictive
value(NPV) were applied to evaluate the established models. Prediction
results of three NB models by different preprocessing methods were
displayed in Tables 4 and 5.
From Tables 4 and 5, we could find that value of Q for NB model by
raw spectral data (NB-0 model) was 70.91%. Values of SE and SP of NB-
0 were 66.67% and 75.00%, respectively. And values of PPV and NPV
were 72.00% and 70.00% respectively. By using NB-0 model in the
external validation, 16 duck eggs were predicted wrongly, among
which 7 fertilized duck eggs were mistaken as unfertilized eggs and 9
unfertilized duck eggs were mistaken as the fertilized. Results illu-
strated NB-0 model with raw spectral data achieved an unsatisfactory
result of identifying unfertilized duck eggs from fertilized ones.
Therefore, S-G and SNV pre-processing methods were used for VIS/NIR
spectral data to improve the prediction ability of prediction model.
The prediction results of validation set of NB model by S-G pre-
processing method (NB-1 model) were showed in Tables 4 and 5. As
could be seen, the value of Q for NB-1 model was 83.64%. The values of
SE and SP were 80.77% and 83.33%, respectively. values of PPV and
NPV were 84.00% and 80.00%. respectively. However, 9 duck eggs
were predicted wrongly among which 4 fertilized duck eggs were
mistaken as unfertilized duck eggs and 5 unfertilized duck eggs were
mistaken as fertilized duck eggs. The prediction results of the NB-1
model was significantly better than that of the NB-0 model, which
suggested that S-G pre-processing methods could smooth raw data to
remove high frequency noise and improve signal to noise ratio of
spectral curve.
To improve the prediction performance of NB model, SNV pre-
processing methods were also applied for spectral data. Prediction re-
sults of validation set for NB model by SNV pre-processing method (NB-
2 model) were listed in Tables 4 and 5. Q of the validation set was
94.54%, and 1 fertilized duck egg was mistaken as unfertilized duck
eggs and 2 unfertilized duck eggs were mistaken as fertilized duck eggs.
The values of SE and SP were 92.31%, were 92.31% and 96.55%, re-
spectively. PPV and NPV were 96.00% and 93.33%, respectively.
Compared the performance of above prediction models, the pre-
diction performance of NB-2 model was superior to other models pre-
sented. SNV pre-processing method was used to correct scatter inter-
ferences and differences due to particle size differences between the
duck eggs. To perform the SNV pre-processing correction, the mean
value of each spectral data was subtracted from the whole spectrum and

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Fig. 4. Elimination of Outliers by MD method for calibration set.

Table 3 Table 5
Results for the LOOCV validation with elimination different outliers. The prediction performance of external validation for NB-0 (raw data); NB-1 (S-
G); NB-2 (SNV) prediction models.
Number of samples Validation results of LD Validation results of MD
(%) (%) Model Q (%) SE (%) SP (%) PPV (%) NPV (%)

92, 141 82.53 – NB-0 70.91 66.67 75.00 72.00 70.00

84, 57, 92, 141 82.93 – NB-1 83.64 80.77 83.33 84.00 80.00
57, 84, 92, 141 – 82.92 NB-2 94.54 92.31 96.55 96.00 93.33
57, 81, 83, 84, 92, 141 – 83.33
NB-0, naive Bayes model by raw data; NB-1, naive Bayes model by S-G pre-
LOOCV, leave-one-out cross-validation; LD, Leverage Diagnostic; MD, processing method; NB-2, naive Bayes model by SNV pre-processing method; S-
Mahalanobis Distance. G, Savitzky-Golay; SNV, standard normal variate; Q, the all prediction accuracy;
SE, the prediction accuracy for the fertilized duck eggs; SP, the prediction ac-
Table 4 curacy for the unfertilized duck eggs; PPV, positive predictive value; NPV,
The prediction results for the validation set, NB-0 (raw data); NB-1 (S-G); NB-2 negative predictive value.
(SNV).
Predicted
was the optimum prediction model with higher prediction accuracies
and more reliable predictive performance.
Model Actual Fertilized Unfertilized Correct/Total
3.4. Validation result of the optimum prediction model
NB-0 Fertilized 18 7(False Positive) 18/25
Unfertilized 9(False Negative) 21 21/30
Total – – 39/55 669 duck eggs were used for validation of the optimum prediction
NB-1 Fertilized 21 4(False positive) 21/25
model. NB-2 model was applied to discriminate each duck egg for va-
Unfertilized 5(False Negative) 25 25/30 lidating the stability and predictive ability. Each duck egg was detected
Total – – 46/55 by the optimum model of NB-2 to validate the stability and predictive
NB-2 Fertilized 24 1(False Positive) 24/25 ability
Unfertilized 2(False Negative) 28 28/30 The spectral waveband from 550 nm to 940 nm of the unfertilized
Total – – 52/55 duck eggs and the fertilized ones was preprocessed by SNV pre-pro-
cessing at the first. Then each pre-processed spectra data of duck eggs
NB-0, naive Bayes model by raw data; NB-1, naive Bayes model by S-G pre-
was predicted respectively by NB-2 model. Prediction process of each
processing method; NB-2, naive Bayes model by SNV pre-processing method; S-
unknown samples by NB-2 model was showed in the Fig. 4.
G, Savitzky-Golay; SNV, standard normal variate.
Prediction process contained modeling and predicting. NB method
was based on the theory of Bayes probability, the prior probability was
these centered values were divided by the standard deviation of each
calculated in the part of NB-2 model and the posterior probability in the
spectral data. Compared with the original spectra and S-G pre-proces-
part of prediction (Fig. 5), which could classify the data according to its
sing method, the reason why SNV pre-processing method made the
posterior probability dynamically (Zhang et al., 2017). The posterior
model prediction better may be that the SNV algorithm eliminated the
probability of each sample in two categories of 1 and 0 were calculated
spectral scattering caused by the uneven size of duck eggs by correcting
and compared to determine the category of the unknown sample.
each spectral curve. Therefore, the established NB-2 prediction model
A total of 669 eggs including 303 fertilized eggs and 366

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J. Dong et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 157 (2019) 471–478

Fig. 5. Prediction process of each unknown samples by NB-2 model.

unfertilized eggs were used for prediction detection. Prediction ac-
curacies of NB-2 model were shown in Table 6. The value of overall
prediction accuracy was 94.77%. And the value of prediction accuracies
with fertilized eggs and unfertilized eggs were 93.40% and 95.90%,
respectively. Compared to predict fertilized duck eggs, the optimum
model of unfertilized duck egg got a higher accuracy.
4. Conclusion
In this study, the prediction model of the unfertilized duck eggs by
using naive Bayes method was established. The results showed that the
VIS/NIR transmittance spectral data contained fertility or infertility
information of duck eggs. MD and LD methods were applied to elim-
inate outliers. Then, S-G and SNV pre-processing method were used to
improve the prediction ability of models. Established models were va-
lidated by LOOCV and external validation. NB model by SNV pre-pro-
cessing (NB-2) showed the best prediction performance, which yielded
that the overall prediction accuracy of the validation set was 94.54%
and the prediction accuracy rates of internal validation was 95.06%.
The prediction accuracy of 667 duck eggs by means of the optimum
model of NB-2 was 94.77%. The results suggested that the VIS/NIR
spectroscopy combined with mathematical modeling methods could be
used as a non-destructive method for detecting the unfertilized duck
eggs.

Table 6
Prediction results of NB-2 model.
NB-2 model Predicted

Fertilized Unfertilized Correct/Total Accuracy (%)

Actual Fertilized 283 20(False Positive) 283/303 93.40

Unfertilized 15(False Negative) 351 351/366 95.90
Total – – 634/669 94.77

NB-2, naive Bayes model by SNV pre-processing method.

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J. Dong et al.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the National Natural Science
Foundation Project of China (NO 31571921) and the Natural Science
Foundation Project of Beijing, China (NO 6162015) for supporting this
research.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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