For even the keen ornithologist, it could be difficult for identifying two individual small birds. But this is not going to be a cumbersome activity from now onwards with the development of an Artificial Intelligence that recognises tiny birds.
For the first time, the researchers showed how Artificial Intelligence could be used for identifying small individual birds. It was a bit hard to trace the tiny individual birds. The findings are published in “Methods in Ecology and Evolution” of the British Ecological Society journal.
Lead author of the study André Ferreira said that the computers can identify individual tiny birds that the human beings find hard to trace. André Ferreira said that they have overcome one of the greatest limitations in bird watching and their studies.
André Ferreira is also part of the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), France. The researchers collected thousands of labelled images of birds and then used this data to train and test the Artificial Intelligence models.
They trained the Artificial Intelligence models to recognise images of individual birds in wild populations. Soon after this training, the AI models were used to detect individuals they had not seen before. In t6he study, the researchers said that they got 90 per cent accuracy.
The Ai model in tracing small birds is a milestone in studying individual animals or birds. It is difficult to identify birds and animals. The method of tying colour bands to the legs of birds is also tiresome. But this AI model is an answer to all these issues, the researchers said. The monitoring of birds through AI will help in monitoring the population of an individual bird community
The Artificial Intelligence used here for tracing small birds is known as convolutional neural networks. The researchers claim that this would help in solving image classification problems. The convolutional neural networks method has been used to identify bigger animals. It has never been used in smaller animals like birds.
The AI model that is developed now can only recognise individuals it has been shown before. The computer will not be able to identify new birds, whose pictures have not been fed into the AI model.
