iBird Photo Sleuth 1.12

The latest update of iBird Photo Sleuth now offers access to a team of ornithology experts, providing additional assistance in bird identification. The app's "Help Me Identify a Bird" forum, which has been active for a decade and boasts over 100,000 members, is at your disposal.

Occasionally, an app stands out from the crowd due to its remarkable features. iBird Photo Sleuth fits this category precisely. It utilizes a cutting-edge machine learning "brain" capable of identifying any bird species found in North America from photographs, regardless of the image quality. Photo Sleuth harnesses Apple's state-of-the-art CoreML machine learning system to deduce the species even from distorted, blurry, and poorly contrasted images. Astonishingly accurate, this app has been trained using over 2 million photos of bird species.

iBird Photo Sleuth is designed to be used in the field without requiring an internet connection. The app contains its own CoreML database. Simply take a photo using your camera or select one from the built-in iPhone Photos gallery (support for Dropbox, Google Photos, and OneDrive coming soon). Don't fret if the bird appears as a small blotch in the frame; Photo Sleuth is intelligent enough to identify the distinguishing features that set it apart from over 900 bird species found in North America.

Once you submit your photo to the Sleuth, it will generate a list of its top 3 possible matches as thumbnails. Each thumbnail will include a "Confidence" value ranging from 0% to 100%. For highly accurate analyses, the value will be high; for less certain matches, the value will be lower. If the app detects that your photo does not contain a bird, it will display "Not a Bird." However, it may still suggest a bird species if certain facial features resemble those of a bird. For example, my selfie was categorized as "Not a Bird" for the top spot and identified as a Barn Owl for second place.

To corroborate the 3 suggestions made by Photo Sleuth, you can tap on any of the thumbnail images to access more details about the species. This includes an enlarged illustration, explanatory text highlighting important identifying characteristics, and a migration range map. The range map incorporates a paragraph describing the bird's habitat and range, providing confirmation that it is indeed found within your GPS location. A future update will introduce our "Birds Around Me" technology to further narrow down the selections made by Photo Sleuth. Additionally, from this same screen, you have the option to open a comprehensive species profile in our iBird app (if installed on your device) to access more detailed information such as the bird's songs and calls, similar bird species, behavioral traits, and much more.

You have two methods for sharing your results: sharing your photo and Photo Sleuth's suggestions with friends via Apple Messages, Email, Facebook, Twitter, and other standard Apple activity menu functions, including printing.

There is also a button allowing you to optionally share your photo and Photo Sleuth's identification results with Mitch Waite Group. This will help us improve our neural network through both correct and incorrect suggestions, enhancing the performance of our artificial intelligence. We assure you that we only use your photograph for training purposes, and the copyright remains with you.