Reviewing audio and using photos on browse-next

We are slowly making the next version of the Cacophony Portal feature complete with the old version. This new version is quicker, more mobile friendly and has a bunch of features not available on the old version, including a dashboard, email summaries, improved user management, and more.

The major functionality that was missing was the ability to review audio recordings. This has now been added. We've also added the ability to overlay photos from the point of view of the camera to help interpret thermal recordings, along with other, smaller improvements

Reviewing audio recordings

To review audio recordings on the new portal navigate to https://browse-next-test.cacophony.org.nz/, click  on Activity, select Bird Monitors at the top. This will show you recent bird recordings.

You can select date range and which locations you would like to see recordings for. Opening up the Advanced search lets you search for a particular species or recordings that have been starred, flagged, or given a custom label.

There is also an option to export the meta data to a spreadsheet to chart longer term trends.

To review an audio recording simply click on one on the right side and it will open up a spectrogram with a list of tags. The tags are sections of the spectrogram marked with a box for each tag where the algorithm has identified a potential sound of interest. The AI/machine recognition is run over each tag to try to identify the sound. Each tag is listed below the spectrogram, showing the sound that was identified.

You can listen to the whole recording when you press play. Or you can listen to a tag by clicking on it in the spectrogram, or in the list below the spectrogram. When you select a tag, the spectrogram will zoom in on that tag to make it easier for you to see the waveform. You can then confirm or correct the tag.

There are still some capabilities missing, such as the ability to resize tags. We will add these shortly.

Adding overlay photos

A new version (13.10.1) of Sidekick on iOS and Android allows you to upload photos to browse-next from the point of view of the camera. These are useful for understanding a thermal recording if you can't remember the exact landscape that the camera is looking at. The photo is taken from the location tab (don't forget to press save).

An editing tool allows you to scale and stretch the photo to more accurately match the thermal image. This can be accessed by clicking on devices, your camera name, settings and then reference photo.

The photos can be viewed when reviewing a thermal recording by clicking on the photo button on the bottom left. You can then slide the photo over and back as the video is playing. You can also change the transparency using the slider on the bottom right, so you can see the photo and the thermal video at the same time.

This video gives a quick demonstration

This change fixes a bug that stopped the photos from loading to old version of the portal as well. There are other minor bug fixes included.

Other features

We have added a few other minor features to browse-next as well:

• You can control what tags are shown in the dashboard by going to Manage Project, Other settings
  
  
• You can add your own custom labels for a project. For example a sanctuary may want to have labels for inside, or outside of the fence. You can set these labels by selecting Manage project, Labels
  
  You can add labels to a recording when you are reviewing it and you can search for recordings with specific labels
  
  
  
• Audio and video test recordings are now visible and labelled as test recordings. This includes 2s test thermal recordings that are taken at the start and the end of the recording window each day