Not Even Scientists Can Tell These Birds Apart. but Now, Computers Can
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Not even scientists can tell these birds apart. But now, computers can:
[...] For years, researchers have identified birds by placing colored bands on their legs. They use those bands to identify birds in the wild-and in photographs and videos back in the lab. The task can often be laborious, Levin says.
[...T]eam member Andre Ferreira, a Ph.D. student at the University of Montpellier, decided to try a kind of artificial intelligence. The tool, called a convolutional neural network, sifts through thousands of pictures to figure out which visual features can be used to classify a given image; it then uses that information to classify new images.
[...] Ferreira fed the neural network several thousand photos of 30 sociable weavers that had already been tagged. [...] To take the photos, he set up cameras near bird feeders equipped with radio-frequency antennas. As soon as the birds landed, a small computer recorded their identity using their PIT tag, and a camera snapped pictures of their backs every 2 seconds. (The rear view is the part of the bird seen most often while they are nesting or foraging.)
After just 2 weeks, Ferreira had enough photos to train the neural network. [...W]hen given photos it hadn't seen before, the neural network correctly identified individual birds 90% of the time, they report this week in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Doutrelant says that's about the same accuracy as humans trying to spot color rings with binoculars.
Ferreira then tried the approach on two other bird species studied by Damien Farine, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. The tool was just as accurate in identifying zebra finches in captivity and great tits in the wild. Both species are widely studied by ecologists.
Journal Reference:
Andre C. Ferreira, Liliana R. Silva, Francesco Renna, et al. Deep learningbased methods for individual recognition in small birds [open], Methods in Ecology and Evolution (DOI: 10.1111/2041-210X.13436)
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