

Show HN: Using computer vision to detect birds in parks - sawthat
http://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/

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iamwil
xkcd is a pretty great programming language. You draw the feature that you
want, and then the internets implements it somewhere, somehow.

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zuck9
But the difference is only one person can use it.

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cbhl
My professors used to joke about the "Grad Student" programming language all
the time.

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erjiang
Speaking of CV + birds, I knew the guys behind a small company called
Ornicept.

Basically, wind turbines kill birds. To protect birds, you have to collect
data on birds in the area. The standard way of doing this was literally
putting a guy in a lawn chair for a few hours each day counting birds, and
then extrapolate the numbers.

They put some cameras in the field and run CV on the footage to count the
birds instead. Cameras are cheaper than people in lawn chairs, apparently. I
don't know if they still do this, but it was their initial product.

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kowdermeister
Almost :) [http://imgur.com/gDWXo08](http://imgur.com/gDWXo08)

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hemangshah
Looks like it does quite well (on good images with closeup of a single bird).

Some fails:

[http://i1-news.softpedia-
static.com/images/news2/Washington-...](http://i1-news.softpedia-
static.com/images/news2/Washington-Woman-Sues-Duck-Owner-for-275K-200K-After-
the-Bird-Attacked-Her-439085-2.jpg)

[http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2012/181/1/e/eyes_on_a_bir...](http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2012/181/1/e/eyes_on_a_bird_by_mikatrta-d55fdtd.jpg)

A couple that barely made it:

[http://www.jlvaillant.com/Animals/Birds/Egrets-
Herons/i-CDVT...](http://www.jlvaillant.com/Animals/Birds/Egrets-
Herons/i-CDVTkQm/5/L/Bird-000132%20-%20Version%203-L.jpg)

[http://www.nps.gov/calo/naturescience/images/IMG_1399_edited...](http://www.nps.gov/calo/naturescience/images/IMG_1399_edited2.JPG)

On the whole, its very impressive though!

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vinayan3
[http://i.imgur.com/Svn2bZ4.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Svn2bZ4.jpg)

Also, Matt Zeiler runs an image recognition startup which the image above was
generated from. Check them out at [http://clarifai.com/](http://clarifai.com/)

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cowpig
[http://bioexpedition.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/Peacock_...](http://bioexpedition.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/Peacock_With_Fanned_Tail_600.jpg) wrong

[http://totallygreencrafts.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/11/bac...](http://totallygreencrafts.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/11/backyard-bird-feeder-spring-craft-
photo-420-FF0507EFDA01.jpg) returns ???

even [http://howtomakeapapercrane.net/u/paper-origami-
crane.jpg](http://howtomakeapapercrane.net/u/paper-origami-crane.jpg) fails!!!
OK OK maybe the "NO" is correct this time

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infinitone
Heh.. the peacock does a fine job protecting itself... even from computers.

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r3m6
Nice. They use deep convolutional neural nets, which is the key algorithm that
dominated the ILSVRC 2014. This computer vision contest included, among other
challenges, recognizing different bird (and dog and cat and spider and.... )
breeds. There is a blog post about ILSVRC that even uses the same xkcd comic
;) [http://blog.a9t9.com/2014/10/amazing-progress-of-computer-
vi...](http://blog.a9t9.com/2014/10/amazing-progress-of-computer-vision.html)

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franciscop
I put a picture of some chicken breasts and it didn't recognize it, is it a
feature?

Joke aside, incredible work here. Did you do everything from scratch or used
some library to get faster results?

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verelo
I'm seeing a lot of pictures of flowers and bees in the bird pictures. I'm
guessing this is due to the way the training is done, anyone from Flickr who
can comment on that?

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tlack
Some pretty clear bird photos aren't working either; I guess it has to be a
close up, which kind of ruins the usefulness for me.
[http://rideintobirdland.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/Littl...](http://rideintobirdland.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/LittleBlueHeron_10.jpg)

~~~
JangoSteve
Also, the _exact_ question you're trying to answer makes a difference. If the
question is, "Is this a picture of a bird?" where "of a bird" means that the
primary focus of the picture is a single bird, then your picture _should_
return "No". That's different than, "Are there one or more birds in this
picture?"

I'm not sure which question Flickr's team actually seeks to answer here.

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kcarnold
It's cool that a team of deep learning researchers can pull this off quickly.
Anyone know of an "image2vec" (word2vec for images) that would empower others
to try out similar things? (unfortunately it would need a better name, because
"vectorize" means something different for images.)

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ajtulloch
Caffe (and other frameworks) provide exactly this. It's basically:

1) To setup, load a pre-trained AlexNet/Overfeat/other architecture model
(e.g. trained on ILSVRC2012)

2) To get a vector from an image, run a forward pass on the images, and
extract the activations at a given layer (e.g. fc7) as the output vector.

[http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/gathered/examples/feature_ex...](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/gathered/examples/feature_extraction.html)
is a step-by-step walkthrough.

There's a lot of mystique around deep learning and these kind of problems, but
it's not _that_ difficult to use these tools.

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tolkienfanatic
Does not recognize Big Bird. I proclaim this to be a failure.

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avalaunch
Ha. I tried Big Bird too. Under "For Bird?", it said "It certainly wants to
be."

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atburrow
Is this something that could be accomplished with the help of CCV?

[https://github.com/liuliu/ccv](https://github.com/liuliu/ccv)

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bambax
Totally not what I was expecting!

What would be very cool would be some kind of trigger app where you leave your
phone in a tree for an hour, and it takes pictures of all the birds that come
within range.

Detecting whether a given image has a bird in it, while certainly difficult
and "interesting" from a CS point of view, is not very interesting from a user
perspective? (Photographers can always tag their images when they submit
them).

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rictic
The advantage of doing it from a user perspective is that people in practice
don't tag their images, but others want to find e.g. CC licensed pictures of
blue jays in flight.

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talmand
XKCD requests Park or Park with Bird.

Flickr built service as requested. Web page titled Park or Bird but works as
Park or Park with Bird. Who named this thing?

Cool project regardless.

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callesgg
Does not work on tablet :(

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therobot24
looks like either a typo or a missed edit of a previous figure:
[http://imgur.com/FUQru1m](http://imgur.com/FUQru1m)

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azeirah
[http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

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pbhjpbhj
>"Hey, yeah! I went to Rocky Mountain once!" //

Hate this jokey style of response. Is it stating that the image is from Rocky
Mountain; Perhaps it's just a random comment-bot statement about national
parks? Bleurgh.

Yes, I'm sure there's a demographic that enjoys inane comments written as if
the presentation layer was conscious.

