iBird Photo Sleuth
| Category | Price | Seller | Device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reference | $9.99 | Mitch Waite Group | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
Every now and then an app breaks out from the pack with features that are simply astonishing. iBird Photo Sleuth fits that mold; use its machine learning "brain" to identify a photograph of any bird of North America, regardless of the photo’s quality. Photo Sleuth uses Apple’s new CoreML machine learning system to figure out the species in even the most distorted, fuzzy and poor contrast photograph. The Photo Sleuth app has been “trained” by over 2 million photos of bird species to ID birds with uncanny accuracy.
You can use iBird Photo Sleuth in the field -- no internet connection is required, because its CoreML database is contained in the app. Take a photo with your camera or select it from the built-in iPhone Photos gallery (Dropbox, Google Photos and OneDrive coming). Don’t worry if the bird is a tiny blob in the frame; Photo Sleuth is smart enough to find the features that distinguish it from all other 900+ bird species of North America.
After you submit your photo to the Sleuth, it will give you a list of its top 3 guesses as thumbnail sized images. Each will display a “Confidence” value between 0% and 100%. When the Sleuth is really sure of its analysis, it will produce a high value; when unsure it will display a low value. If the app thinks that you have submitted a photo of something other than a bird, it will display “Not a Bird.” Of course, some people’s faces look like birds, so it may still suggest a bird species. For example, my selfie came up with “Not a Bird” for the #1 spot and the Barn Owl for #2.
To help confirm the 3 guesses made by Photo Sleuth, you can tap on any of the thumbnail images to open more species details, including an enlarged illustration, text that explains important field marks and a range map that shows the migration coverage of the bird. The range map includes a range and habitat paragraph that helps confirm that the species is indeed located in your GPS area. A future update will add our “Birds Around Me” technology to further narrow the choices that Photo Sleuth guesses. On this same screen you may open a rich content species account in our iBird app (should you have it on your phone) to review much more information, including playing the bird’s songs and calls, seeing similar birds, behavior details and much more.
Sharing of your results can be done two ways: you can share your photo and the Photo Sleuth guesses with your friends via Apple Messages, Email, Facebook, Twitter and all other functions such as printing, which appear on the standard Apple activity menu.
There is also a button for optionally sharing your photo and the results of the Photo Sleuth guess with Mitch Waite Group, so that we can improve our neural network. Both correct and incorrect guesses help us improve the performance of the artificial intelligence. Or course, we only use the photograph for training, and the copyright remains with you.
If you would like more information about using iBird Photo Sleuth please visit: http://ibird.com/sleuth/sleuth.html
Be sure and check out our new bundle The Delighted Birder; which includes this app plus iBird Pro and iBird Hawaii-Palau.
Reviews
I love this app!
Instructor29
This makes identifying birds so much easier! One can use iBird Photo Sleuth to outright identification of a bird, or to confirm the identification they've already done, or even to point one in the direction they can go for further identification. I love the percentages of begging correct so a person can evaluate whether or not to accept the app's identification.
IBird photo sluth
papa sas
Easy to use and very accurate. As a wildlife photographer (serious amateur) it’s been fun to use. It’s even been able to ID some birds where the photos are at an odd angle.
Extremely accurate
naturefaith
Very impressive app that’s accuracy is amazing. It can identify birds from very fuzzy photos that stumps my expert friends.
Exceptional, iBird Sleuth!
thawme
I downloaded this app because I could not believe it could do what it does. My wife and I tested it out most of the morning when we first got it. Right it was most of the time or close enough that we got to the correct bird very quickly. What was/is unbelievable is that no matter the fuzziness and smallness of the birds in our photos, this app can guess either right on or so close that it is easy get get the identity os said bird. And, of course, the more submissions it has the smarter it gets! Thanks for a great bird guide!!!
Dead on...most of the time
Ornithusiast
I am absolutely amazed at how accurately this identified birds from my photos. Even got one I misidentified way back and recently was told otherwise (which was an Olive-sided Flycatcher). It missed two. It missed an Empid Flycatcher but amazingly enough I had two photos of the same bird and it got it on the second try which was a much better side shot. Well, can’t complain because we all know how difficult those Empids are to identify! It also missed a photo of a dark morph Rough-legged Hawk. Thought it was a Red-tailed. Again, not complaining. A lot of people think a dark morph Roughy might be a Red-tailed and I can’t imagine how hard it is for software to figure this out. I tried all sorts of birds. In trees, in water, in flight on the ground. It got them right. I love it. I am definitely going to tell my birding friends. Now I got to try it with some lousy bird photos. But, I don’t take lousy bird photos...most of the time! At least I don’t keep lousy bird photos. Got to take some! A great app and well worth the money. My hats off to the excellent job.
Incredible!
paulshel
I have so much trouble filling out all the characteristics (tail shape, eye color,etc) in other apps, and still have to “wing it” (pun intended) and hope I’m right. This app id’d two of my mysteries within seconds! Much more gratifying. Thanks! Worth every cent. Paulshel
Amazing app!
Bookworm 411
I have been a fan of the iBird apps for many years. When I saw the iBird Photo Sleuth in the App Store, I had to give it a go. The very first time I snapped a quick picture of a bird I thought I recognized, the app confirmed I was correct. For the bird watching fanatic, this is a “must have” app.
Pretty Cool
JK cook
I tried this out today and it works pretty well. I didn’t have too many pictures of American birds, but the ones I tried worked. Seems like it would be a very helpful app. I don’t know how well it would work with photos snapped on the iPhone in the field, because generally the birds are really small so by the time you blew them up to fill up the square in the app, they might be too grainy. It’d be neat if it really worked. Hopefully they will expand their database to include the rest of the world’s birds. Of course, that might fill up the entire memory of the phone.
