The method of removing unfertilized eggs in China’s poultry egg incubation industry relies on artificial irradiation of eggs, with low degree of automation. The accurate identification of fertilized eggs in group duck eggs during the early incubation period is the key technology to realize the automation and intelligence of the incubation process. A group of duck eggs hatched for five days was taken as the research object, and the images of the group duck eggs were collected using corresponding image acquisition devices. Based on the commonly used single shot multibox detector (SSD) network, an improved SSD target detection algorithm was proposed to accurately identify the fertilized eggs and non-fertilized eggs in the eggs of early hatching period. Using MobileNetV3 lightweight network as a model feature extraction network to quickly and efficiently extract image features. At the same time, the inverse residual block was used instead of the standard convolution layer in the SSD regression detection network to improve the detection network efficiency. The results showed that the average recognition accuracy of the model was 98.09%, the recall rate was 97.32%, and themissed detection rate was zero. It was better than 96.88%, 96.17% and 1.04% of the network model before the improvement. Therefore, this method can provide a new basis for the research and development of intelligent robot or robot hand related to duck egg incubation industry and accelerate the intellectualization of poultry egg incubation industry.