Identifying Harlequin Ducks using Merlin’s Photo ID (photo by Doug Hitchcox, Macaulay Library).

Now, if you can take a photo of a bird on your smartphone, you can use Merlin to identify it for you. You can snap a photo with your phone, choose a photo from your phone’s gallery, or even take a photo of a photo, and Merlin’s image recognition can probably identify it. . The photo doesn’t need to be great, either. It’s the latest helpful feature provided on the free Merlin cellphone app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The new Photo ID uses computer vision technology to identify birds in photos.

Photo ID was developed in collaboration with Dr. Pietro Perona’s computational vision lab at Caltech, Dr. Serge Belongie’s computer vision group at Cornell Tech, and collaborators on the Visipedia project. Merlin “learns” to recognize bird species based on training sets of hundreds of thousands of photos from birders who share their images with eBird and the Macaulay Library.

Check out Photo ID and the many other features of the free Merlin Bird ID app at https://www.allaboutbirds.org/get-more-from-merlin-bird-id-with-these-powerful-features/