Birdsnap: The Perfect App For Birdwatchers
Birdsnap: The Perfect App For Birdwatchers
A free app has been developed by researchers from Columbia Engineering under the guidance of Professor Peter Belhumeur. This app is called Birdsnap. It is useful for identifying bird species through uploaded snaps and access to a comprehensive website that has over 50,000 images. Birdsnap also features birdcalls for each species. It also has a Tree of Life which connects and organised each of the species in the group and the frequency of their sightings during particular seasons and at certain locations.
Birdsnap also provides information regarding how the algorithm identifies every type of species. The app then automatically annotates images of the birds to provide information about their field marks.
The team from Columbia Engineering designed what is known as 'part based one versus one features'. This feature is called POOFs for short and it classifies birds of just 2 species based on their distinctive features. The system builds many POOFs for each of the pair of species and chooses parts marked by it as the field marks.
Birsnap can also be used for POOFs for the identification of uploaded images. Modern cameras, especially those available on phones, embed the date as well as the location in their images. Each of these pieces of information improve the precision with which classification is made. This all can also pinpoint which birds are migrating, departing or arriving.
The goal is to use computer vision as well as AI to lead to the evolution of a digital field guide to aid in recognition of birds. Birdsnap has been developed by the same scientist who developed Leafsnap for trees. The incredible collection of data available through Birdsnap and organising the data well can be quite easy using the app.
Along with his colleague Professor David Jacobs from the University of Maryland, Professor Belhumeur are also stressing how this work could be used for identifying different species automatically, in work they have conducted for over a decade. State of the art face recognition algorithms can be used to find correspondence between different parts of different faces. T
Birdsnap works by detecting parts of the bird through visual similarity of comparable parts. Each species is labelled for about 17 parts. Visually similar species are automatically developed. There are about 500 species of birds that can be detected by this app.
The only snag is that the system will not be able to identify new species or even aliens for that matter! But one must not underestimate the genius of scientists. With every change in the environment, scientists have been working to uncover the impact of global warming and climate change. With each new step towards challenges confronted by humanity,science had always had the solutions. From diseases to travel in space, science has come up with some of the most useful solutions for the challenges man faces.
Science is limited in its solutions only if researchers give up. But such is the genius of the scientists that they work relentlessly for finding the solution. Much like the character of Abhimanyu in Mahabharata, humanity is caught in a Chakravyuh of changing circumstances, and science alone can come up with the right answers for the questions we face.
