{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T17:54:09Z","timestamp":1785434049312,"version":"3.56.0"},"reference-count":31,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,30]],"date-time":"2026-04-30T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1777507200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["32372426"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["32372426"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]},{"award":["32372426"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["32372426"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01h0zpd94","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"the National Key R&D Program Project of China","award":["2024YFD2000901"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2024YFD2000901"]}]},{"name":"the Key R&D Program of Hubei Province","award":["2024BBB051"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2024BBB051"]}]},{"name":"the Special Fund for Basic Scientific Research Business Expenses of Central Universities","award":["2662025PY005"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2662025PY005"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Animals"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The global poultry hatching industry faces severe challenges of resource waste and animal ethics issues due to the routine culling of day-old male chicks. Meanwhile, early sex identification of 4-day-incubated chicken embryos is limited by low accuracy, as embryos at this stage have weak, low-contrast blood vessels that are highly susceptible to interference from the eggshell\u2019s texture. To address these issues, this paper proposes a non-destructive early sex identification method for chicken embryos based on an improved MobileViT-V3 model. Taking the lightweight hybrid architecture MobileViT-V3 as the backbone, we embedded a Micro Feature Enhancement module (MFE-Module) in Stage 3 to strengthen the extraction of fine vascular details, and a Multi-Scale Adaptive Attention Fusion module (MSAAF-Module) in Stage 4 to realize adaptive weighted screening of multi-source features. Experiments on the self-constructed dataset of 4-day-incubated embryos show that the improved model achieves a test set classification accuracy of 92.26%, with an F1-score of 92.15%, a recall rate of 92.12%, and a Kappa coefficient of 0.845. It outperforms mainstream models such as YOLOv12, ShuffleNetV2, ConvNeXt-T, ResNet, and Swin-ViT, with only 2.98 M parameters and an inference speed of 97.6 FPS, well exceeding the 30 FPS real-time requirement of industrial sorting lines and showing high potential for practical industrial deployment. This method provides a new scheme for non-destructive, high-precision, and high-efficiency early sex identification in poultry hatching.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/ani16091377","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,30]],"date-time":"2026-04-30T08:46:26Z","timestamp":1777538786000},"page":"1377","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["A Non-Destructive Early Sex Identification Method for Chicken Embryos Based on Improved MobileViT-V3"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Qian","family":"Yan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Chengyu","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Zhoushi","family":"Tan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Zesheng","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3404-6907","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Qiaohua","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China"},{"name":"Ministry of Agriculture Key Laboratory of Agricultural Equipment in the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yangtze River, Wuhan 430070, China"},{"name":"National Research and Development Center for Egg Processing, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,30]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","first-page":"13","article-title":"Research status, problems and trends of egg processing in China","volume":"40","author":"Zheng","year":"2023","journal-title":"Chin. 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