Merlin Bird ID app

Red-necked Grebe by Peter Hassett, Draycote Water 1 March 2017

Red-necked Grebe by Peter Hassett, Draycote Water 1 March 2017

You may be interested in this free app, available for Apple and Android devices:

Smartphones are becoming an increasingly important part of birding. If you want to be the first person to hear about a rare bird, digiscope a rarity, or submitting your sightings, having a small portable computer at your fingertips is enabling all of this to happen. We also look to our smartphones as identification aids now that field guides are packaged into apps. But what if your app could instantly scan your photo and match it to a species based on an archive of millions of bird images? It can.

The Merlin Bird ID app was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to do just this, taking a photo you snap in the field, and suggesting an identification. Photo ID identifies birds in photos using computer vision technology trained on nearly 3 million images uploaded to Macaulay Library through eBird checklists.

The high accuracy of the Photo ID tool is largely thanks to the extensive collection of images at Macaulay Library, showing birds from many different angles. Annotations on these images (a box drawn around each bird in the photo) also help teach the Photo ID tool to find the birds in the photo–-anyone can help improve Merlin’s accuracy by adding new annotations with Macaulay’s MerlinVision tool.

Click on the link for more information: Blog – Merlin Bird ID app – SWAROVSKI OPTIK