Visio Nerf, headquarted near Nantes in France has created an infrared vision system using Sony cameras to rapidly identify fertilised eggs and incubate them to hatching to prepare for Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons. The system connects a proprietary CPU and lighting system with a Sony XC-EI50 near infrared camera.
The vision system is able to accurately analyse a wide range of standard egg varieties, including turkey, duck, pheasant and chicken, and processes over 50,000 eggs per hour; depending on egg species and incubation tray conditions, this can increase to 150,000 eggs per hour; many orders of magnitude greater than even the most skilled candler.
And the adoption of the technology is proving phenomenal, with a rapidly growing number of hatcheries using it; not just to meet the Christmas demand but to also to meet the constant demand for other birds, notably the 50 billion chickens reared globally for food each year.
Sony
