Recognising Kiwi and Whistlers

The Cacophony team have released an update to our bird recognition software. It can now recognise:

• Kiwi
• Whistler (Norfolk or Australian Golden)
• Human

This is in addition to morepork and bird.

Many thanks to the people in the Norfolk Islands who have tagged 1500 calls of Norfolk Golden Whistler. We have augmented this with recordings from the Xeno database of bird calls.

Also thanks to Laura Molles and Carol Bedoya (Great Spotted) and Donald Chandler (North Island Brown) whose kiwi recordings we were able to use to train our model.

There are a few issues that we're aware of. If your recording has static in it then it often classify that as a bird. We hope to release a fix for that next week. We've also seen some mistakes with chainsaws being classified as human. These classifications should improve as they get corrected and we learn.

One cool thing you can do with this now is to use the bird monitor as a kiwi detector. You could set up an alert to get an email whenever a kiwi call is detected

Next we're going to work on identifying rifleman as requested by one of our customers. Do you have any birds in particular you would like to be able to identify? Let us know birds@2040.co.nz.

Once we have a little more confidence in our ability to detect human voices we will automatically delete those recordings.

New Cacophony Index

We have also created a new cacophony index. This uses the our algorithm that recognises bird song. The cacophony index is calculated for each 20s segment of a recording. It is the percentage of the 20s that contains bird song. Hopefully this number will increase over time due to your predator control and planting efforts.

One of the impacts of this new index is that it is mostly 0 at night when there are no birds. This makes sense to me.