This is a lot more wholesome than my project. I detect birds and automatically spray them with a sprinkler to keep away from pool area. code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away Writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/
How about deer?
I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
181–190 of 197 posts
Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been meaning the same thing to stop deer from eating from my garden... would you do anything differently if you were to do it again?
I've been pleasantly surprised how well it has worked and how robust it is. It's installed at my parent's house and I am many states away so I was paranoid about making it resilient since i'm usually not there and have to fly to get there. So, i really tried to think of everything I could. I thought it might overheat the first afternoon or have other problems, but it's been running for months now uninterupted. Someti…
whats the spend roughly on an ongoing basis?
Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#183Earlier 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…
Still, we're talking orders of magnitude here. I've fed Shazam with a stream of the cheapest lapel microphone you could get, mounted behind a rack filled with twelve very noisy servers, in a hall filled with 5000 people also all being noisy, and it would reliably recognize music from the other side of that hall before I could do so myself (I had to walk halfway there to hear “oh, yes, it's actually right”). And that's on a stream encoded with 9600bps GSM compression. With Merlin, I can hold out my phone on a silent day, hear the bird loud and clear and it will hardly register.
Shazam primarily identifies on the geometry of spectogram peaks, FWIW (I wrote my master's thesis on the DSP of music recognition back in the day; it's possible that they are doing something more fancy now, of course, but I'm not sure if they would want to). I don't know exactly what Merlin is doing.
Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#184This is a lot more wholesome than my project. I detect birds and automatically spray them with a sprinkler to keep away from pool area. code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away Writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/
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Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#185I 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.
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Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#186I just wonder, wouldn't ornithologists be interested in a system in where people voluntarily upload bird photos from their camera, helping them with bird spitting? They do that by hand already, after all. Think something like FlightRadar and crowd-sourced ADB-S info?
The article mentions https://app.birdweather.com/ which appears to be exactly that.
Wow, indeed it is! For all the shitty things that Internet ended up being, every niw and then some amazing use still emerges.
Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been pleasantly surprised how well it has worked and how robust it is. It's installed at my parent's house and I am many states away so I was paranoid about making it resilient since i'm usually not there and have to fly to get there. So, i really tried to think of everything I could. I thought it might overheat the first afternoon or have other problems, but it's been running for months now uninterupted. Someti…
whats the spend roughly on an ongoing basis?
I had been using gemma-4-31B-it llm for cost/accuracy and it was super cheap, about $0.65/month. I had also downscaled the size and back tested on bird/no-bird images from my camera.
But, then I noticed that it was missing birds that were at the back of the pool and I needed to use higher resolution and better models and cost went up 10x. Now, it's to high for my liking and I need to do more model testing to get it down to a few dollars a month that seems reasonable. I can also reduce frequency, I'm doing every 2 mins during daylight hours.
Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#188This is a lot more wholesome than my project. I detect birds and automatically spray them with a sprinkler to keep away from pool area. code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away Writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/
How about deer?
Deer would be easy and cheaper. You could run lower resolution and cheap model and not miss a deer.
Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unifi provides local RTSP streams in different resolutions, birdnet will happily take a rtsp and strip it's audio out for processing (ffmpeg?)
Have you had any difficulty with simultaneously retrieving >1 RTSP stream from the camera at a time, 24x7? Such as full resolution video/audio to a NVR for security purposes and then a second stream to birdnet?
Negative, you can always use go2rtc or scrypted to proxy them.
Re: I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I built an esp32 with 48khz mic soldered on, feeding rtsp stream to server in living room. Works amazing. Need to build more mics.
I like to know more about your project can you help with the details
https://github.com/Sukecz/esp32-birdnet-mic
I basically used this guide, but a different ESP32 device (so I had to change the pinout, but otherwise...). It's currently plugged into mains power, but in the future when I make additional, I'm aiming to make them solar + battery powered so I can stick them in more 'remote' areas.
Give it a go! The quality is astounding vs a security cam.