Thursday, June 11, 2015

Auto Bird ID

Machine "intelligence" is becoming quite sophisticated and the freely available demonstrations such as the capabilities of Google Photos make such capabilities available to us all.
I recently became familiar with the bird identification service from the Cornell Ornithology lab from a photography blog. I am familiar with this lab because of their efforts to utilize the contributions of citizen scientists and I blogged about the labs use of technology back in 2005.
The new ID service works like this. Upload an image. Mark a couple of key points on the image (beak, eye, tail) and indicate where you took the picture. The service will attempt to identify the bird.
merlin1

merlin2
I tried the service with a few images from my collection (I found them with a Google photo search for "bird" from my collection of images.). The Cornell ID service correctly identified the pileated woodpecker. I am not certain about the hummingbird. I have photographs that clearly show the ruby throat and am guessing my photo shows a female.
I have included another photo if you want to try. Download the pic and then go to the Cornell site.
practicebird

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