Computer Scientists Develop an Interactive Field Guide App for Birders

A team of researchers led by computer scientist Serge Belongie at the University of California, San Diego, has good news for birders: they have developed an iPad app that will identify most North American birds, with a little help from a human user. The app is essentially an interactive field guide, where computer vision algorithms analyze the picture the user submitted, ask questions and call up pages with pictures and information about a bird species that is a likely match. The researchers' ultimate goal is to fill a gap in the world of online search. Text-driven search, such as Google and Wikipedia, has been wildly successful. But identifying images has so far proven much more difficult. That process involves uploading a picture to a search tool, such as Google Goggles, and asking what it is. This works well with well-known landmarks and pictures.