“Ultimately we want to create an open platform that any community can use to make a visual classification tool for butterflies, frogs, plants or whatever they need,” Belongie said.Īdded Perona: “This app is the culmination of seven years of our students’ hard work and is propelled by the tremendous progress that computer vision and machine learning scientists are making around the world. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, Belongie is the co-founder of Visipedia, the Google-funded umbrella project that is using advances in machine learning and computer vision to help classify objects in photographs. “In building Merlin Bird Photo ID, we were especially concerned with the quality and the organization of the data,” said Serge Belongie, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech. Then, like any good birder, the system considers species that would be found at that specific time of year and in that location using information from the eBird program, which collects an average of 7 million bird observation records each month from around the world. Merlin scans its photo database for possible matches. “You zoom in on the bird, confirm the date and location, and Merlin will show you the top choices for a match from among the 650 North American species it knows.”Ĭornell Tech and Caltech computer scientists trained Merlin to recognize birds by showing it nearly 1 million photos that were collected and annotated by birders and volunteers mobilized by the Lab of Ornithology. “When you open the Merlin Bird Photo ID app, you’re asked if you want to take a picture with your smartphone or pull in an image from your digital camera,” said Merlin project leader Jessie Barry of the Lab of Ornithology.

Because Merlin Bird Photo ID can be used on mobile devices, it can go anywhere bird-watchers go. The app was developed by Cornell Tech and California Institute of Technology computer vision researchers in partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and bird enthusiasts. The Merlin Bird Photo ID mobile app has been launched and, thanks to machine-learning technology, can identify hundreds of North American species it “sees” in photos.

The Merlin Bird Photo ID mobile app can identify hundreds of North American species it “sees” in photos and can now go anywhere its user goes.

Merlin project predictions 2016