[HN Gopher] BirdNet - Identify Birds by Sound
___________________________________________________________________
BirdNet - Identify Birds by Sound
Author : r_singh
Score : 545 points
Date : 2021-07-23 10:32 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (birdnet.cornell.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (birdnet.cornell.edu)
| tyingq wrote:
| I downloaded the app and tried to fool it with whistled bird
| songs. It correctly identified the species as "Human - Homo
| Sapiens - Likely".
| z2 wrote:
| I am very proud to say that I was successfully able to get
| "Northern Cardinal: Cardinalis cardinalis - Almost certain" by
| whistle-copying the cardinal that lives in my backyard.
| larodi wrote:
| Managed to fool it as Chlidonias Hybrida !
| peanut_worm wrote:
| There is a similar app for photos called "Merlin". Its not always
| a 100% accurate but it is usually at least close.
| Exmoor wrote:
| Merlin also recently added sound ID for North America. I would
| assume they're working on other regions as well based on their
| previous track record.
| SirFredman wrote:
| I've been using this app for a few weeks now and it is awesome,
| it really makes you aware of the amount of plumage in the area.
| Highly recommended!
| lubesGordi wrote:
| Not only does it help you identify birds by sound, but it shows a
| list of birds in your area so you can identify by sight!
| kkirsche wrote:
| Is this a replacement or an augment for the Merlin ID project
| from Cornell?
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/...
| quokka wrote:
| BirdNet has been around for several years now, while Merlin
| just got sound-id recently. Merlin has coverage for about 450
| birds of North America, while BirdNet can id around 1000 birds
| of N Am. and Europe.
|
| With BirdNet you make a recording, highlight the interesting
| section of the sonogram, and upload that section to the BirdNet
| servers. With Merlin you start recording and the software ids
| birds in real time, popping up species as it goes.
|
| My assumption is that, because it runs locally on the device,
| Merlin is going to be less accurate than whatever BirdNet is
| able to do on its beefy servers. But it is has the advantage of
| working without a data connection. Merlin can also id from
| photos and descriptions.
|
| So the one isn't a replacement for the other. It's great to
| have options.
| nicbou wrote:
| I have used it, and it's VERY good. It also shows you the birds
| you can expect in your area and the recent sightings nearby. It's
| a great introduction to a layer of life I didn't pay attention to
| before.
| philote wrote:
| And the interface makes it easy to isolate the bird noise you
| want to identify. It's such a great app.
| tvirosi wrote:
| The idea that I've heard people for ten years suggest as 'this
| brilliant app idea I had', which is finally no longer a technical
| impossibility.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Right on schedule: https://xkcd.com/1425/
| atonse wrote:
| Yep! I just left a comment about having this idea 10 years ago
| and my wife being annoyed that I didn't build it. But hard to
| explain "I would've literally received a PhD working on this"
| when my interest was mostly on the hobby side.
| bialpio wrote:
| Is anyone else weirded out by the fact that the Android app is
| published from something that that looks like a personal account,
| as opposed to some kind of organization? Not sure how publishing
| for Android works - is it possible to hand off an app to a
| different account when you're no longer affiliated with the
| organization?
| distances wrote:
| Yes, you can transfer apps between accounts.
| albert_crowley wrote:
| Local bird/wildlife tracking company near me is launching some
| consumer hardware that records/analyzes birdsong as well as links
| in to the radio tags that researchers put on birds they are
| tracking. If you are a bird person you might be interested:
| https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/terra-listen-to-wildlife-...
| atonse wrote:
| I had this idea nearly 10 years ago when my wife and I started
| dating and she introduced me to (very amateur) birding. I even
| talked about contacting Cornell for their database. But it was
| always going to be a hobby project.
|
| So when she read about this a few weeks ago, she literally
| smacked me for not building it. Now if I tell her it's on the
| front page of Hacker News AND everyone here loves the idea even
| more, I'm going to get another, harder smack because she knows
| how HN is full of others like me!
|
| (yes I'm aware that this community more than others will agree
| that ideas by themselves are a dime a dozen, but nonetheless, it
| would've been a really fun project)
| 1001101 wrote:
| My mom is a master naturalist and has listened to (hours of)
| frog field recordings to determine which types of frogs are at
| specific locations for our department of natural resources
| (IIRC). There is a paper that describes how to calculate
| minimum adult population from audial surveys. If you still need
| to scratch that itch, I'm sure there are still some interesting
| applications along these lines.
| antidaily wrote:
| You could have been a thousandnaire.
| LanceH wrote:
| A couple years before pg wrote about classifying email, I was
| using the same technique on classifying movies. So close...
| spoonjim wrote:
| I hope you realize that The market price of this service is 0,
| set by Merlin.
| atonse wrote:
| That's also what I would say "there's no money to be made
| here - it would be a fun hobby project and I could learn some
| machine learning but that's about it"
| [deleted]
| smackthrow wrote:
| Why does she keep smacking you? You may want to seek help.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| How about doing the reverse? Listening to birds from different
| parts of the world on-demand?
|
| Listening to bird sounds is now recognized to have positive
| impact on mental health[1], So how about selecting a particular
| region on the earth and listing to high quality bird sounds?
| There some good YT playlists[2] but a separate service could be
| more functional, Tie up with bird zoos to do it live, share a
| piece of revenue for conservation and you'll have my
| subscription.
|
| [1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-listening-to-bird-song-
| ca...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EaSSgqsQs4
| hasmanean wrote:
| You can build the next generation bird app. This one requires
| uploading to the cloud to recognize bird calls.
|
| What if you used the AI hardware in the phone to do the audio
| recognition?
|
| For efficiency you could even use geolocation and figure out
| which species are found in a location and download a model just
| for those. Anything not matched could be uploaded as before.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| I asked a veterinarian friend who specializes in birds (and
| is a long time bird watcher), and she knew the app and said
| that it works pretty well (coming from her, that's definitely
| high praise)
|
| The only thing she'd improve was exactly what you mentioned:
| offline recognition! (and also keeping the bird sound
| recordings to export them later)
| marcdevo wrote:
| see above thread for info on Merlin with offline sound ID
| capabilities...
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Yep, that's great news. Thanks!
| marcdevo wrote:
| I work at the Cornell Lab, and we also have an app that is
| more consumer-oriented, and which DOESN'T require uploading
| the recordings to the cloud -- see Merlin Bird ID app
| https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
|
| When the Lab's researchers conceived of BirdNET, there were
| no reliable bird sound identification tools. BirdNET was
| built as a rapid prototype, engaging computer science
| students to build an app for that users to test the machine
| learning algorithms. BirdNET proved to be a research
| breakthrough and by 2020 was performing with far better
| accuracy than five other apps tested.
|
| That success opened the way to apply computer vision to sound
| identification in the Lab's outreach and education app,
| Merlin.
|
| Merlin offers OFFLINE functionality, and multiple ways to
| help identify birds, including through a user describing the
| bird, taking a photo of the bird, and now recording a bird
| song or call. Merlin Bird ID is integrated with the Lab's
| systems and resources, including updated taxonomy, bird
| information from eBird and Birds of the World, rich media
| from the Macaulay Library, life list building tools
| integrated with eBird, and more.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Thanks for your work! I'm installing right now but won't be
| able to try it out for a while. How far away are we from
| distinguishing between different calls from the same
| species?
|
| Some birds in my locale mostly repeat themselves, but some
| seem to have 'vocabularies' of 3-5 different calls, and you
| can hear pitch and timing inflections within those - might
| be just random variation in combination with different
| calls it might yield 30-60 'words'. Sometimes I've been
| sitting under a tree and heard what seemed to start out as
| a conversation that degenerated into an argument followed
| by a physical fight.
|
| Even crows seem to have distinct patterns/variations in
| their cawing, and given what we know about their tool-using
| abilities I'm curious to know how they use their voices.
| I've seen remarkable behaviors like a group of crows
| harassing a falcon to interfere with its pursuit of a
| smaller songbird.
| hasmanean wrote:
| Oh right, turns out I had it downloaded but hadn't used it
| (the bird pack was too big to download over data).
|
| The benefit of using hardware accelerated ML built into the
| phone is that it's much more lower power. It's designed for
| continuous use cases ("Hey Alexa" or Hey Siri). So you
| don't have to turn the recording on and off and miss the
| bird call.
|
| I don't know if continuous monitoring can be used by third
| party apps. But having it on all the time, with geolocation
| would be amazing. You could set alerts etc.
|
| If you could use multiple phones to locate the bird in
| 3space that would be neat. Then you could tell people where
| to point their cameras. Maybe a standalone IoT monitoring
| device could be placed in forests to count each and every
| bird. This is the future.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| /Maybe a standalone IoT monitoring device could be placed
| in forests to count each and every bird./
|
| This is actually the 'real' research motivation behind
| the bird classification work: Slap a microphone to the
| side of a tree, pick it up in a month, and get some
| accurate picture of what species have been in the area.
|
| Birds are relatively easy to observe, thanks to their
| vocalizations, which makes them an indicator species. We
| have a good idea what many species eat, so they end up
| telling you quite a lot about the surrounding ecosystem.
|
| However, it turns out that the 'soundscape problem' where
| the microphone is just attached to a tree is a bit more
| difficult than identifying foreground birds only, using a
| device that can be pointed in the relevant direction by
| the user.
|
| We've been encouraging further work on the soundscape
| problem by hosting the BirdCLEF and Kaggle competitions,
| and have been seeing steady progress. Improvements in the
| 'hard' soundscape problem have been driving improvements
| in the 'consumer' identification algorithms.
|
| https://www.kaggle.com/c/birdclef-2021/overview
|
| [source: I've been working with the BirdNet folks on and
| off for the last few years, and co-host the Kaggle
| competitions.]
| ghaff wrote:
| Saw a talk a couple years ago about similar techniques
| being used to identify marine mammals.
| https://research.redhat.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/02/RRQ-V...
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Entirely Off-topic, but I really like this way of
| quoting. It's surprisingly satisfying to see the quoted
| text bounded between a starting and an ending delimiter.
| hasmanean wrote:
| /"However, it turns out that the 'soundscape problem'
| where the microphone is just attached to a tree is a bit
| more difficult than identifying foreground birds only,
| using a device that can be pointed in the relevant
| direction by the user."/
|
| Yes pointing a directional mic introduces a whole new set
| of mechanical challenges.
|
| Maybe you could build an irregular grid of
| omnidirectional microphones and use signal processing to
| direct the beam digitally (similar to radio beam-
| forming). Now you'll need more processing horsepower to
| do FFTs to do phase shifts. Although if you assume the
| bird calls only occupy discrete frequencies you might be
| able to save some computation by just computing those.
|
| Perhaps a machine learning model could be trained that
| does all of this for you. Then you get the benefit of
| hardware acceleration. Some ML chips can handle DSP
| tasks.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Yeah, one has to think of the 'microphone budget.' For
| microphone arrays, I think it's probably better overall
| (from the ecosystem management angle) to cover a wider
| non-overlapping region than getting a more comprehensive
| picture of a single point...
|
| The quality of the single-source classifier is the
| obvious scientific bottleneck, though; improve it, and
| everything else will work better. (We've also got plenty*
| of existing training data for this case.) So that's where
| we've been focusing most of the energy.
|
| * - depending on species, of course. See also: xeno-
| canto.org
| tejtm wrote:
| Any chance of making the app available via F-Droid or some
| non siloed vector
| b3morales wrote:
| Love the app, thanks for your work. But can you comment on
| why the Facebook SDK is part of it? (I've seen a request in
| a proxy on the sign-in screen to graph.facebook.com.)
| justinlkarr wrote:
| The off-line version of this (Merlin) worked great in the
| Boundary Waters in June. Detected visually-verified grouse,
| vireos, woodpeckers, trumpter swan and bald eagles on Nina
| Moose and Agnes lakes.
| DennisP wrote:
| For ID by song, does Merlin sacrifice any accuracy by being
| offline?
| volfied wrote:
| Thank you for all your work on Merlin. I heavily use that
| app when I go backpacking, and in fact just last night it
| helped me identify a red crossbill in Deschutes National
| Forest.
|
| It would be amazing if BirdNet eventually supported
| offline.
| dheera wrote:
| Oooh you can maybe geolocate users who don't give you
| location permissions by listening to the birds around you.
| boredumb wrote:
| No time like the present.
| kjaftaedi wrote:
| I had this idea as well, but as you start to build the app you
| quickly realize that each bird doesn't just have one sound, but
| many sounds and trying to do this accurately takes much more
| effort than you're probably expecting.
|
| Download any of the existing bird apps that help you recognize
| birds by their sound and you'll see that each bird often has
| 3-4 distinct sounds, each of them different, and these are just
| partial examples.
|
| You'd have to be extremely dedicated (and very good at machine
| learning) to see this idea through to completion.
| atonse wrote:
| I agree. And also I actually realized a large part of the
| issue here might also be other background noises adding ..
| ahem.. noise to the samples.
|
| Because in nature, it's almost never just one bird you hear.
| You hear it in the context of all the other sounds.
| devin wrote:
| True, but Shazam is a testament to what's achievable even
| without audio source separation. Even going back about 10
| years when I first tried it, I was kind of stupefied that
| it managed to work in a noisy department store.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| But in some sense Shazam has it very easy - it is working
| from a discrete set of specific audio recordings, not,
| say, the set of artists, or the set of songs. Shazam is
| useless for live performances, or covers (by different
| band) of songs (unless those specific recordings are also
| in Shazam's database). Birdnet is tackling the problem of
| trying to get some essential properties of one species'
| song (and each bird is a new live performance, by a
| different cover artist).
|
| There used to be an an app called Midomi (I think?) that
| could identify songs by humming or you singing, which was
| cool, but then I vaguely remember it rebranding itself
| and being less useful. Does anyone else know of a song-
| recognition app that is more like BirdNet and less like
| Shazam?
| sombremesa wrote:
| > I had this idea as well, but as you start to build the app
| you quickly realize that each bird doesn't just have one
| sound, but many sounds and trying to do this accurately takes
| much more effort than you're probably expecting.
|
| Effort? Not really so much (stand on the shoulders of giants,
| etc.)
|
| Data? Yes. Lots and lots of data.
| _understood_ wrote:
| As I understand it there are even sub-dialects for each of
| these bird calls/songs. The example shared with me was
| compared to the English language in the U.S. where you would
| expect to hear stark differences in the southern states vs
| the New England area with a greeting like: "hey ya'll".
|
| Unfortunately/fortunately I can't get the visual out of my
| head of a southern speaking crow looking for trash near my
| house now.....
| state_less wrote:
| There is cultural transmission between animals too. Like
| here is some whale song spreading from Australia out into
| the Pacific.
|
| https://youtu.be/P99CR4y-TYw
|
| She looks like she is delighted btw.
| [deleted]
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| Plus, so many birds will improvise their songs, pulling parts
| of other birds' songs into their songs. And many will even
| outright imitate other birds (not only parrots, but corvids
| and some others). Many amateur birders like me often cannot
| tell imitations from the real ones.
| [deleted]
| marcdevo wrote:
| For the 400+ sounds that Merlin (the user-friendly, offline-
| functional sister app to BirdNET) can now identify with
| 80-90% accuracy, it took a team of dozens of bird sound ID
| experts several years to annotate tens of thousands of
| individual audio spectrograms. On average, they needed about
| 1,000 recordings per species). Here is a bit more about how
| they did it:
| https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/2021/06/22/behind-the-
| scenes...
| [deleted]
| b0rsuk wrote:
| And some birds can mimic voices, for example blackbirds and
| jays. They often impersonate other birds, or cats.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| To be fair the idea is probably not _that_ uncommon but it 's
| hard to execute right.
|
| I think I had someone in my class (about 10 years ago)
| attempting this as a project.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm sure there have been plenty of attempts at this, but
| ultimately became Not A Hotdog for birding.
| atonse wrote:
| I've told my wife that. It's not a unique idea, I'm sure many
| have had it. But that's not even 1% of the work in actually
| building it.
| bcraven wrote:
| The Android app is about about 3 years old, so let her know
| there's 3 years of kicking to be done!
|
| https://www.appbrain.com/app/birdnet-bird-sound-identificati...
| b0rsuk wrote:
| It's one of the cases where idea is cheap, but the devil is in
| the details. Executing the idea well is the whole problem.
| brimoore wrote:
| What if the sound produced is made by different animals? What
| does it return?
| ragebol wrote:
| There's always a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/
| ggerganov wrote:
| This is very inspiring work - thanks for sharing!
| [deleted]
| truth_ wrote:
| I have known this project for a while, and I must warn you that
| this _only works as expected_ on North American birds, and
| sometimes European birds.
|
| Outside of that, it simply fails.
|
| This is because the datasets are extremely highly skewed towards
| these geographic regions in terms of number.
| ronjouch wrote:
| iOS app "Requires iOS 13 or later" :-/ . Too bad I can't use this
| on my still functional-and-receiving-security-upgrades iPhone 6.
| I suspect an overlap between the population enjoying birds and
| the population _not_ buying a new phone every year, so I hope
| they can reconsider and broaden support.
|
| I contacted the authors at the email on the page, asking them to
| support iOS 12. Maybe email them too if you're also impacted.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Can't wait to use this during Central Park walks with my SO!
| johndill wrote:
| God I love this thing. Now I know all the birds in my yard by
| sight and sound and which SOB is the one that starts the racket
| 1/2 hour before sunrise (looking at you Catbird)
| larodi wrote:
| using it for months now and it really makes one more aware of the
| songs of bird around. hope is properly funded and gains more
| popularity in the future. great app!
| gadders wrote:
| Great application.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I've found this to be a lovely app. It doesn't seem to have all
| the birds I'd like, but the way it organizes information and the
| general smoothness is exemplary.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Mmmm, could i reimplement this in a raspberry pi and continuously
| let it run offline in my parents garden?
|
| If so, any thoughts on how hard it would be? Since I don't use ml
| a lot and only experimented with recommendation engines with
| ml.net
|
| ( A lot of trees and a lot of birds at my parents place)
|
| Mostly because my dad would love this and it could be a fun
| project to get a better understanding of ML.
|
| Another interesting product is bird box, that keys you know which
| birds are feeding now:
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mybirdbuddy/bird-buddy-...
| notdang wrote:
| There is a link to the source code:
| https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET
|
| I doubt that it will work on a Raspberry, but you can run it
| elsewhere and just send the audio to it.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| If i'm not mistaking the linked dataset is more useful to run
| it offline: https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Lite
|
| Since it contains a tensorflow model and tensorflow can be
| used with ml.net.
|
| It would analyze recordings every 3 seconds. Since that is
| what the model expects. No?
| ganzuul wrote:
| Now to figure out what they say, and where we should intervene in
| ecological matters.
|
| Perhaps we could gather more data with the help of Federated
| Learning and the like.
| jobigoud wrote:
| > Now to figure out what they say
|
| This should be interesting to the Earth Species Project.
| https://www.earthspecies.org/
| ganzuul wrote:
| That looks interesting. Thank you.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Some bird by me always sings the first note of the Ed Edd and
| Eddy theme, making me start playing it in my head. Maybe I can
| figure out what bird it is.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I tried writing an program to do this ~10 years ago (I called it
| "Tweeter") using a system like Shazam. The problem is, Shazam can
| detect _specific_ songs based on about a dozen different analysis
| points (found another use for poles and zeroes). But if the song
| is sped up or muffled, it differs too much from the source
| recording. Birdsongs are far more variable, even within the same
| species.
|
| Ironically, at the time I discovered Cornell was doing this same
| thing, but it looks like they finally got to a product by
| throwing an ML classifier at it. Very cool, ML is perfectly
| suited for this.
|
| The interesting thing I learned during my study was that there is
| an entire system of describing bird sounds with nonsense words
| ("skee-dlees chis chis chis") that goes back over a 100 years.
| hasmanean wrote:
| In the Anglo-Saxon world there's always another system of
| describing things.
|
| The official system used Latin and Romantic language words
| (frequency modulation, intercourse, feces). It's the jargon
| found in textbooks and research papers and taught in
| universities.
|
| The underground system uses Anglo Saxon words and is used by
| lab techs and people in the field (figuratively). Examples
| would be (tune, warbling, fuck, shit).
|
| One of these languages is considered respectable. The other is
| vulgar and suppressed to the point of cultural genocide.
|
| This is the way. It has been this way since feudal times.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN
| year after year. 99% may be a quick, mildly entertaining read,
| but that 1% tends to be empowering or life changing for me. I've
| had a continuously growing interest in plant and bird
| identification as a hobby (animals are a bit easier). I've gone
| so far as to research apps, put Audobon society books on my
| wishlist, and try to look up some specimens I see in my area.
| Unfortunately it's, frankly, a steep learning curve and not a
| habit yet for me to take pictures, remember to look at them
| later, search their characteristics, etc. This will be the
| perfect tool to help me jumpstart my newfound interest and get
| more familiar with the flora and fauna around my home.
| joshklein wrote:
| You can find some interesting starting points at kaggle.com if
| you want e.g. a large set of photos of agricultural plants
| labeled as healthy or diseased (allowing you to immediately
| start in on building a classification model without all the
| upfront grunt work).
| argc wrote:
| You should PictureThis for plant indentification. It works
| really quite well for me in the Pacific Northwest (though not
| perfect).
| jrgoff wrote:
| iNaturalist is another good option for plant identification
| (and other forms of life as well). It has decent machine
| learning for suggesting IDs and is also backed by its
| community providing IDs. I've been using it a lot this year
| and have found it pretty helpful for IDs (though some regions
| and life forms are more likely to have good identifications
| than others), as well as for showing me what people are
| seeing in the area, and feeling like I'm contributing useful
| data.
| derwiki wrote:
| Ive had good experiences with Seek for plant identification
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Just remember to watch out for impersonators when trying to
| find Seek from an app store.
|
| There are a bunch of really similar apps with $99/week
| billing that activates after trial automatically.
| imhoguy wrote:
| PlantNet works nice too, of course quality of picture and
| opaque plant surrounding helps too. Good for species but
| harder with subspecies.
| dotsam wrote:
| BirdNet is great and has helped me to identify some birdsong. If
| you are also interested in identifying plants, PlantNet is good
| too. https://identify.plantnet.org/
| stinos wrote:
| Try talking to BirdNet, it'll tell you species = homo sapiens.
| Most plant recognition apps will stil try to match a plant when
| feeding it pictures of humans.
| Y_Y wrote:
| "Breakthrough: AI Research Proves Once And For All That
| Humans Are Birds, Not Plants!"
| hatch_q wrote:
| Probably a good reason for this. A lot of images of plants
| are in hands of humans (just checked PlantNET db) - i guess
| ML is modeled to ignore humans.
| stinos wrote:
| That could be one aspect, but I was actually talking about
| taking pictures of complete persons. Usually turns out
| you're a beetle, or a worm, or a butterfly :)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| cmpb wrote:
| Any comparison of PlantNet to iNaturalist[0] (regarding quality
| of the product / size of the community)? I use iNat frequently
| for identifying native plants and animals around the yard and
| it's been extremely helpful and active (I typically get at
| least one verification on each item I post, oftentimes two or
| three).
|
| [0] https://www.inaturalist.org/
| stinos wrote:
| The local app here for native plants (Obsidentify) beats
| PlantNet for me, but I have the impression there might be
| some 'user experience' into play: I know enough about plants
| to know what the distinctive features are and I know enough
| about the app/AI to know that it wants properly cropped
| pictures with those features, and other users whos
| observations have the most chance of being validated and
| accepted do so as well. So the thing is probably very well
| trained for that, which is less the case for PlantNet. Again,
| that is just a theory, but when talking with other people the
| story is similar: the people saying it doesn't work for them
| are typically uploading non-cropped and/or non-identifying
| pictures.
| fleddr wrote:
| Note that for the opposite use case, knowing the bird yet wanting
| to hear its sound, there's this:
|
| https://www.xeno-canto.org/
| r_singh wrote:
| I've been able to spot over 50 types of birds (including Great
| Hornbill, Rufous Necked Hornbill, Greater Flameback) in Goa this
| monsoon with the help of this app (it discovered over 120 unique
| species, but they were hard to spot), even though it was not made
| for South Asia
|
| Apart from the usefulness of the app, interface and usability is
| great too
| schleiss wrote:
| I tested it with some Swiss birds [1]. It works extremely well.
|
| [1] https://www.vogelwarte.ch/de/voegel/voegel-der-schweiz/
| Razengan wrote:
| See also: Merlin Bird ID, powered by recordings and sightings in
| Macaulay Library and eBird.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/...
| anyonecancode wrote:
| I have the app and do like it, but my phone's camera quality
| doesn't seem good enough for this to work properly (iPhone 6).
| I have to get pretty lucky and be able to be super close to the
| bird so that very little zooming or image enlargement is
| needed.
|
| Still, nice app as a field guide.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| thanks, I was going to try it, but for some reason that
| application needs access to my contacts
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| You can share your "life list" of bird sightings. Optional,
| but permissions get shown at install time instead of at use
| time.
| ABraidotti wrote:
| I have been using this app and it's awesome. The features are
| pretty simple but complete. Looking at the list of identified
| birds makes me think I'm just a two-legged ape living in a bird
| community, and I like that.
|
| I am also convinced cardinals and blue jays get along great with
| each other but are "not like other birds" types.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Fantastic.
|
| Those who do this the analogue way, often distinguish between
| bird song and "bird language." The former focuses on identifying
| species. The latter focuses on understanding the information
| birds convey to one another. Since a lot of it relates to
| predators (watch out, a fox!), this might be augmentable to
| determine the presence of silent animals too.
|
| fun.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I'd be interested in something like this to identify "dialects"
| in certain species of local birds. The bellbird/korimako[1] is
| well known for having distinct shared motifs within a given
| area.
|
| The dialectal song differences are readily noticeable, but
| mapping the dialect boundaries between populations would be
| really interesting.
|
| [1]: http://www.nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/bellbird
| ganzuul wrote:
| How hard would it be for an AI to identify specific information
| conveyed by a call? Perhaps the various alerts that birds
| provide local fauna would be helpful to humans too?
| dalbasal wrote:
| My intuition is that it would be no different than human
| speech recognition. You'd need sufficient data, but the
| principle is the same. There arn't that many "words."
|
| Humans understanding bird calls isn't new. We've probably
| forgotten more than we know. That's not unique to us either.
| Different species often recognize each others' calls,
| particularly danger calls.
| jobigoud wrote:
| There is a project called Earth Species that tries to decode
| animal communication using deep learning.
| https://www.earthspecies.org/
| jasonbourne1901 wrote:
| I wonder how well it will do with identifying the Mockingbird who
| plays his car alarm jingle outside my window at night
|
| Edit: Cool, mockingbird is on the list! This link off of their
| site has a sound sample for those that haven't experienced this
| bird
|
| https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Mockingbird/ove...
| aphrax wrote:
| We are lucky to have a number of birds types in our area - this
| app has been amazing for identifying who's who :) I especially
| like that when a match is made a simple link to Wikipedia is
| given. As a result I now know far more about bird migratory
| patterns than this time last year!
| q_eng_anon wrote:
| most cornell thing I've ever seen
| mschulze wrote:
| A German variant is "Naturblick",
| https://naturblick.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/?lang=en
|
| It also allows sharing "sightings" (or "hearings") with a central
| service.
| flakiness wrote:
| The original version [1] is Theano based, but the newest one is
| TF-Lite based [2], probably for supporting mobile.
|
| Unfortunately they don't publish the code of TF version and only
| a TF-Lite model is available. Probably that doesn't matter for
| the exports though since the paper and original version are both
| there.
|
| More interesting thing is that they've been making the dataset
| available [3] for $20 (even before BirdNet). This can be great
| source for training your own bird-net like.
|
| - [1] https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET
|
| - [2] https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Lite
|
| - [3] https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/product/the-cornell-guide-
| to...
| tamlin wrote:
| BirdNet is pure joy.
|
| Thanks to everyone who works on it. We've used the app
| relentlessly for a couple of years in the UK and when you show it
| to people they are amazed. People thank us for it and all we did
| was share it with them. Great work!
| techterrier wrote:
| Im a huge fan of what they are doing at Cornell!
|
| hope im not contravening the rules too much by plugging my
| current project Birda - 'Strava for Birdwatching'
| https://birda.org/
| qwertox wrote:
| I love this app. The only thing I find a bit problematic is that
| if you have a match and fetch more info on the bird (Wikipedia /
| Macaulay Library / eBird), that none of these fragments have a
| "Share"-Button.
|
| I use that "Share"-button a lot (it usually looks like a "<") in
| order to save interesting stuff I later want to look at on my PC.
|
| There is enough free space on the top right for such a button (I
| think it's called the ActionBar?)
| twothamendment wrote:
| Thanks for the great app, been using it for years! Just this week
| I was in a place without cell coverage and wanting to use it.
| I'll have to try out Merlin.
| genki_af wrote:
| Should have called it skynet
| soheil wrote:
| But can it count the number of birds of the same specie? Do
| similar birds sound different to each other and can we detect
| that?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Cornell has some really great resources.
|
| I haven't tried using this particular one. It has its work cut
| out for it. Bird calls are difficult. A mockingbird or catbird
| can sound exactly like a sparrow or finch.
|
| I remember, in the 1990s, when everyone had Nokia bricks, that
| mockingbirds would sometimes copy the ringtones.
| smackay wrote:
| Spotless Starlings here in Lisbon are already mimicking the
| location beeps from rentable Scooters.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That must make the scooter-finders' jobs difficult.
| mjhoy wrote:
| The mockingbirds and catbirds I've heard are easy to identify,
| not from a particular sound but from how they string sounds
| together. It seems to me they copy notes, but not songs.
| grasshopperpurp wrote:
| Yep, exactly. Around here we have a bunch of mockingbirds and
| blue jays, and you'll here the mockingbirds adopt some of the
| harsher sounds of the blue jays, but they usually surround
| them with melodic trills. It makes for a pretty dynamic
| contrast - reminds me of a Jazz solo.
| [deleted]
| rahkiin wrote:
| This seems to work amazingly well even for our local birds.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Shazam for birds?
|
| I don't know if it would hold up in a court of bird law
| sharken wrote:
| No budgies it seems, although they're not usually seen in the
| wild which might be the theme here.
|
| To me it would be cool to be able to decode bird noises to their
| meaning. Am really curious as to what birds are chirping about.
| dekhn wrote:
| I used a similar program which said there was a red tail hawk. I
| looked up, and there was a red tail hawk.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| A lot of TV shows and movies use the red tailed hawk sounds for
| when a bald eagle is on screen. The eagle sounds are much
| cooler but it's basically like the Wilhelm scream at this
| point.
| [deleted]
| yrcyrc wrote:
| Perfect, there are weird birds making a racket every night I
| needed to identify, timely!
| emodendroket wrote:
| This is great. I've become interested in birds over the past few
| years but it's an intimidating subject.
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