Merlin bird recognition application can recognize bird songs recorded on mobile phones

For a long time, there have been some applications that listen to song clips played on the radio and tell you who is singing this song and what it is called. Now, for bird enthusiasts, similar things have made their debut. It is called the Merlin bird recognition application, which can use a mobile phone to identify what type of bird is singing. This application was developed by Cornell Ornithology Laboratory.

Merlin can recognize the sounds of over 400 bird species in the United States and Canada, listen to and use artificial intelligence technology to identify each species. The application displays a real-time list and photos of birds singing or calling in the user's area, and the developers have promised to update it in the future to enable the application to recognize more types of birds.

Researchers have stated that identifying what type of bird is singing has always been very difficult, but when they began to view sound as an image and applied powerful image classification algorithms, they made breakthrough progress, such as algorithms that support the photo recognition feature of the Merlin application. Each sound recorded by the user is converted from a waveform to a spectrogram, which is a method of visualizing the amplitude, frequency, and duration of the sound.

Essentially, the application uses images of bird sounds for recognition. The technology behind the sound recognition process is provided by tens of thousands of citizen scientists who provide bird observations and sound recordings to the global database called eBird at Cornell Laboratories. In this database, there are thousands of sound records used to train Merlin to recognize individual bird species.

The database also contains over 1 billion bird observation data, allowing Merlin to know which birds may appear at a specific location and time. The application can now identify birds in four different ways, including through sound, through photos, by answering five questions about the birds observed by the user, and by exploring the expected bird list in the user's region. Merlin can also recognize the sounds of birds, even when multiple birds are singing at the same time.

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