Machine “intelligence” is becoming quite sophisticated and the freely available demonstrations such as the capabilities of Google Photos make such capabilities available to us all.
I recently became familiar with the bird identification service from the Cornell Ornithology lab from a photography blog. I am familiar with this lab because of their efforts to utilize the contributions of citizen scientists and I blogged about the labs use of technology back in 2005.
The new ID service works like this. Upload an image. Mark a couple of key points on the image (beak, eye, tail) and indicate where you took the picture. The service will attempt to identify the bird.
I tried the service with a few images from my collection (I found them with a Google photo search for “bird” from my collection of images.). The Cornell ID service correctly identified the pileated woodpecker. I am not certain about the hummingbird. I have photographs that clearly show the ruby throat and am guessing my photo shows a female.
I have included another photo if you want to try. Download the pic and then go to the Cornell site.
You must be logged in to post a comment.