Often, people set up bird feeders because they are looking to see other birds. You can’t always look out your window, however, you must miss your few feathered friends that land near your bird. Smart bird feeders allow you to see every member of the avian flock that comes to visit. Some of these paintings can even identify the birds they are painting.
There may be a few bird watchers who recognize every bird they see at a glance, but most of us need a little help with the more unusual species. Fortunately, Stockman’s software for creating an intelligent bird watcher uses the free Microsoft Azure Custom Vision machine learning engine. These are based on similar images to help birders identify their winged visitors.
Stockman explained that he trained his model by taking 20-25 photos from Google Images of each type of familiar bird that comes to the feeder, using this information to train Azure to label each photo with colors. Stockman admitted that this method is not 100% foolproof, but it helps in identifying and classifying local species.
Of course, anyone who installs one of these smart bird feeders must train their modules to recognize birds that live and migrate in their area.