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I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

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Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#131

Post by lordgrenville »

Sesse__ wrote: post #123
phainopepla2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a warning for novice birders: Merlin's sound ID feature produces a lot of false positives.

For me, mostly a lot of false negatives. I have a Pixel 8, and I have no problems using the microphone normally, but somehow, Merlin requires the bird to be within a couple of meters of me and sing for quite a while before Merlin will even say “hearing a bird”. And of course, you have to be dead silent; if anyone talks or coughs, it will mess up the spectogram badly. Given that it's colloquially “Shazam for birds” an…

I think what makes Shazam magically "just work" is that they are searching for the exact embedding of the recorded version of the song - it doesn't work for a cover version, acapella, etc even if it is very similar. (Everyone would want an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song, but I guess it's a very tough problem.)

Merlin is solving the more general problem so makes sense that it's much more finicky and less accurate.

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#132

Post by ButlerianJihad »

lordgrenville wrote: post #131
Sesse__ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, mostly a lot of false negatives. I have a Pixel 8, and I have no problems using the microphone normally, but somehow, Merlin requires the bird to be within a couple of meters of me and sing for quite a while before Merlin will even say “hearing a bird”. And of course, you have to be dead silent; if anyone talks or coughs, it will mess up the spectogram badly. Given that it's colloquially “Shazam for birds” an…

I think what makes Shazam magically "just work" is that they are searching for the exact embedding of the recorded version of the song - it doesn't work for a cover version, acapella, etc even if it is very similar. (Everyone would want an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song, but I guess it's a very tough problem.) Merlin is solving the more general problem so makes sense that it's much more finicky and…

> an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song

YouTube Music and Google Search do OK with these types. Sometimes if I know a song well enough, I will open YT Music, activate the mic search, and sing a few bars, instead of typing the song title.

According to Gemini, SoundHound is also a good app for song-hummers to try.

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#136

Post by utopiah »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #95
comboy wrote: post #22

Btw, Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University is so good that I got some people interested that weren't into that topic at all.

Merlin's story is very interesting: https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/the-magic-of-merlin/ The journey to a magical, free bird sound ID app involves some obvious steps (the NSF gave them money), but the amount of timeline offramps is really high. The NSF didn't think this app was educational ("it's just telling them the answer, they don't even have to work for it!"), the funding ran out so they were thinking of char…

Funnily enough I was in the bathroom (that's where I do my most random thinking) just yesterday evening thinking how template matching in computer vision, e.g. https://docs.opencv.org/5.0/py_tutorials/py_imgproc/py_templ... is basically audio signal processing but instead of being temporal it is spatial. Different signals but same principle.

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#137

Post by walrus01 »

ben1040 wrote: post #10

I did exactly this with BirdNet-Go and my Unifi doorbell cam. Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera so it was easy for the tool to just "listen" to the doorbell and start classifying. I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.

> Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera

Do you mean an RTSP audio only stream separate from the video+audio feed you might ingest to an NVR, or combined audio/video RTSP stream? Most manufacturers of security cameras with ordinary RTSP stream functions support provide both video and audio together. 'Frigate' for instance will auto detect audio stream on a reolink camera and it "just works" in the latest versions of Frigate.

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#138

Post by mlrtime »

walrus01 wrote: post #137
ben1040 wrote: post #10

I did exactly this with BirdNet-Go and my Unifi doorbell cam. Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera so it was easy for the tool to just "listen" to the doorbell and start classifying. I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.

> Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera Do you mean an RTSP audio only stream separate from the video+audio feed you might ingest to an NVR, or combined audio/video RTSP stream? Most manufacturers of security cameras with ordinary RTSP stream functions support provide both video and audio together. 'Frigate' for instance will auto detect audio stream on a reolink camera and it "just works" in the latest versions…

Unifi provides local RTSP streams in different resolutions, birdnet will happily take a rtsp and strip it's audio out for processing (ffmpeg?)

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#139

Post by mlrtime »

bayesianbot wrote: post #128
venmul wrote: post #125

I tried this with Birdnetpi ( https://7ml.in/notes/on-to-birdnet/ ) with Avain Visitors ( https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ ) My camera's doesn't give out rtsp unfortunately

Maybe you could try go2rtc[0]? It can ingest multiple stream formats and output them in a different one. Also has some other nice features, like I use it to ingest one RTSP stream and share that to multiple applications, and to push audio out to my Tapo camera [0] https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc/

Scrypted would work

Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

#140

Post by fyhn »

Sesse__ wrote: post #123
phainopepla2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a warning for novice birders: Merlin's sound ID feature produces a lot of false positives.

For me, mostly a lot of false negatives. I have a Pixel 8, and I have no problems using the microphone normally, but somehow, Merlin requires the bird to be within a couple of meters of me and sing for quite a while before Merlin will even say “hearing a bird”. And of course, you have to be dead silent; if anyone talks or coughs, it will mess up the spectogram badly. Given that it's colloquially “Shazam for birds” an…

I'm not sure why but this seems very phone dependent. I can stand next to another person, both running Merlin in silence, and mine will pick up much more than some people's phones. My phone is not particularly new (Zenfone 8).
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