Dear All,
I have just read the latest issue of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s magazine “Living Bird”. Each edition has an opinion piece “The Catbird Seat” by contributing editor Pete Dunne. This edition’s piece contains an interesting bit of crystal ball gazing by Pete on the way technology as applied to birding is headed. An extract is as follows:
“Consider. There are imaging systems that can read a bar code on the windshield of a car as it speeds past a tollbooth. There are programs that allow passenger screeners at airports to identify individuals by scanning their eyes. How long do you think it will be before there will be bird- identification programs, satellite-linked to your techno-bino, that will capture the image of the bird you see and download the image to your computer at home? Identify it. File it in your Day List, Year List, County List, Life List…for your review. After you get home.
And 100 years of compounded and refined field-identification skills become about as useful as knowing how to calculate a square root on a slide rule or change a typewriter ribbon.”
Pete continues as follows and I wholeheartedly agree with him, even though it would place me in the category of “fuddy-duddy geek”
“So I have, accordingly and cheerfully, proclaimed myself a fuddy- duddy. A stone-knives-and-binocular-toting birder, who is content to identify—or misidentify— real birds in real time (and have a blast doing it).”
The whole piece can be read at : http://www.livingbird.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=2032
Happy New Year to All,
Carl Clifford============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au
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They are not getting easier for me. Probably because I turn medically senile at the end of the month
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
Bird calls MAY be easier to identify – but still not a trivial task!
I think the task of automatic identification of birds is far harder than the examples of number plate recognition and eye scanning.
In those cases the subjects are all arranged facing the same way, and are of similar size. They’d have a poor success rate if the subjects were all different sizes, shapes and colours, facing any old direction, hiding in the undergrowth, etc. Compare the problem to what happens to a camera’s face recognition focusing when the subjects turn sideways.
Rather than identifying species I’d be pretty happy for now if my camera could at least work out which part of the scene was a bird, and focus on it.
I assume the subject is tongue in cheek, but it’s interesting that the incident that inspired it was one where his “fuddy duddy” id skills gave him the wrong answer (identifying a raptor from of photo).
He complained that in the field the bird would be moving, giving him more clues. Perhaps that’s the real lesson from his article. If one feels one needs to see the bird’s flight style to identify it, why try from a photo?
Peter Shute
Bird calls MAY be easier to identify – but still not a trivial task!
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I think the task of automatic identification of birds is far harder than the examples of number plate recognition and eye scanning.
In those cases the subjects are all arranged facing the same way, and are of similar size. They’d have a poor success rate if the subjects were all different sizes, shapes and colours, facing any old direction, hiding in the undergrowth, etc. Compare the problem to what happens to a camera’s face recognition focusing when the subjects turn sideways.
Rather than identifying species I’d be pretty happy for now if my camera could at least work out which part of the scene was a bird, and focus on it.
I assume the subject is tongue in cheek, but it’s interesting that the incident that inspired it was one where his “fuddy duddy” id skills gave him the wrong answer (identifying a raptor from of photo).
He complained that in the field the bird would be moving, giving him more clues. Perhaps that’s the real lesson from his article. If one feels one needs to see the bird’s flight style to identify it, why try from a photo?
Peter Shute