RF-Egg : An RF Solution for Fine-Grained Multi-Target and Multi-Task Egg Incubation Sensing

Eggs and chickens serve as crucial animal-source proteins in our diets, making large-scale breeding egg incubation an essential undertaking. However, current solutions, i.e., visionbased and sensor-based methods, are primarily designed for egg fertility detection tasks under single-egg settings, which have not yet satisfied the goal of multi-target and multi-task sensing. In this paper, we propose RF-Egg, the first RF-based fine-grained multi-target and multi-task egg incubation sensing system with respect to sensing fertility, incubation status, and early mortality of chicken embryos. RF-Egg leverages the weak coupling effects of RFID tags when interacting with eggs, which induces different impedance changes of RFID tags with the incubation levels of eggs, thereby resulting in a variation of low-level phase readings of the backscatter signals. Regarding the challenge of multi-target profiling interference, we propose a multipath combating algorithm to extract the target-induced signal component based on the built signal model, and address non-uniformity issues across multiple tags. Moreover, we devise three unique feature maps tailored to each task, and then design an MultiTask Triplet (MTT) network for multitasking. Our evaluation results based on 189 eggs show that RF-Egg achieves an accuracy of 94.4%, 96.1%, and 90.1% for the aforementioned three tasks when supporting 16 targets. Additionally, our extensive field study in a local egg hatchery suggests that RF-Egg presents the potential to be widely deployed in the modern poultry industry. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.