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Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

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Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#41

Post by ISL »

Toutouxc wrote: post #19
haswell wrote: post #9

The Merlin app has transformed my nature/photo walks, and got me interested in birds. I never realized how many unique birds I was hearing as I’d walk through an area until I turned this app on. It opened a whole new awareness, and helped me remember which bird calls go with which species. There’s also something incredibly cool and satisfying and beautiful about the resulting spectrograms. Watching the shape of the b…

> I blame this app for making me buy a birding lens for my camera Haha, same thing, girlfriend installed Merlin on her phone, our walks turned into birdwatching hunts and now I’m eyeing the nice and affordable RF 100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM to make things more interesting. I’m hoping it stops at that, birding lenses are expensive.

Find a nice used EF 400 f/5.6L. It's hard to know what to write about it, except to say that it's great and has been a reliable companion for years.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#42

Post by digging »

matthberg wrote: post #16
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #12

If you like Merlin, take a look at Seek by iNaturalist.

I don't know much about Merlin's accuracy with bird calls, yet unfortunately Seek isn't enough to accurately identify plants and often leads to incorrect or overly confident (ie wrong) identifications when not enough information is available. In keying out plants, especially at the level of distinguishing species, features needed for identification often can't be gleaned from a single or even sequence of phone photos…

> Seek isn't enough to accurately identify plants

Same for other apps that identify plants, insects, and spiders. It's very frustrating that the public is being sold fully-baked photo identification, when in reality the technology is not there. Especially bad though, as you mentioned, is that even if it were perfect there would still be uncertainty based on features that weren't or can't be photographed.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#43

Post by littlekey »

I'm super interested in their choice of features here; I never expected they'd be using the image of the spectrogram fed into a vision model like a CNN rather than the audio signal itself. My hazy memory from school was that speech recognition typically used MFCCs (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients), which were some sort of manipulation of the frequencies. I don't remember how that really works but it seems more straightforward than turning an audio problem into a visual problem.

I'm not critiquing, as I've used the app and it's excellent, just wondering if anyone could explain more about how feature engineering works in audio and whether this approach by the Merlin team is a standard one or not.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#44

Post by ecolonsmak »

mongol wrote: post #23
Toutouxc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I blame this app for making me buy a birding lens for my camera Haha, same thing, girlfriend installed Merlin on her phone, our walks turned into birdwatching hunts and now I’m eyeing the nice and affordable RF 100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM to make things more interesting. I’m hoping it stops at that, birding lenses are expensive.

I made a choice to make birdwatching an interest I immerse myself with while there. Basically meaning, I prefer to watch birds through binocculars, in the moment, and keep them in memory, more than capturing the moment for later. I am not against the idea of photographing birds as such, I just realized that in most cases, they will remain small even with very expensive lenses, and the effort to capture really great b…

Are there not binoculars available that will take pictures?

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#45

Post by gverrilla »

This app is beyond amazing! Got me interested and curious about birds - only in my backyard I have ID'd more than 30 different species (I live besides a forest reserve in southeast Brazil). I now know them better and learned already how to recognize their music by ear for at least a few of them!

A couple of hours ago I was lucky to have the app recording when a Mesembrinibis cayennensis flew above the house making loud and curious sounds I can't describe really well. I heard it before a few times, but never knew what bird it was and was never able to spot it in the sky (not even today, which is unfortunate because it's a beautiful bird by the photos online!).

When I get some cash and free time I'm thinking about mounting a 24/7 bird id station to leave in my backyard :D And perhaps a live big beautiful spectrogram inside the house..

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#46

Post by JR1427 »

I love birding, and I think many people who think they are not interested would be if they gave it a try.

I think it's a hobby with very few negative side-effects. More people having an interest in birds is great, as it benefits the individual, society, ecosystems and the entire planet.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#47

Post by jnellis »

da39a3ee wrote: post #38
user3939382 wrote: post #10

I’ve tried this a couple times but can’t get it to work because the bird song Im interested in is never the only sound in the environment.

It doesn't require that. But the bird sound does need to be fairly prominent, so yep, somewhere not too noisy would be good.

Perhaps it's possible they could add a pre-filter that cancels selected birds. I often have squawky magpies and starlings that drown out the bird I really want to know about.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#48

Post by ianburrell »

ecolonsmak wrote: post #44
mongol wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a choice to make birdwatching an interest I immerse myself with while there. Basically meaning, I prefer to watch birds through binocculars, in the moment, and keep them in memory, more than capturing the moment for later. I am not against the idea of photographing birds as such, I just realized that in most cases, they will remain small even with very expensive lenses, and the effort to capture really great b…

Are there not binoculars available that will take pictures?

There are binoculars with cameras but they aren't good cameras cause small sensor and not good binoculars cause cheap.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#49

Post by rabbits_2002 »

Toutouxc wrote: post #19
haswell wrote: post #9

The Merlin app has transformed my nature/photo walks, and got me interested in birds. I never realized how many unique birds I was hearing as I’d walk through an area until I turned this app on. It opened a whole new awareness, and helped me remember which bird calls go with which species. There’s also something incredibly cool and satisfying and beautiful about the resulting spectrograms. Watching the shape of the b…

> I blame this app for making me buy a birding lens for my camera Haha, same thing, girlfriend installed Merlin on her phone, our walks turned into birdwatching hunts and now I’m eyeing the nice and affordable RF 100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM to make things more interesting. I’m hoping it stops at that, birding lenses are expensive.

for birds I would recommend something 600mm or more. Smaller birds are hard to photograph with anything under. Sigma makes cheap ones.

Re: Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021)

#50

Post by rabbits_2002 »

IndySun wrote: post #37

Anyone use Merlin with location off? I've used and watched it be ultra common/vague but mostly fail in 6 countries. Is it simply using location and the merest hint of sound captured to calculate the suggested bird? Full disclosure, I haven't used it (since) for around a year, some things can change for the better. I also have a brand new iPhone since - better mics?

Yes pretty much but usually that is enough. It is usually accurate enough to distinguish Northern Flickers and Gilded Flickers which sound almost identical so good enough.
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