This AI Does the Birdwatching for You
Aaravsharma23 wanted to birdwatch without wasting time waiting for birds to show up, so he built this AI device to do the birdwatching.
Birdwatching is an inexplicably popular hobby that involves spending a great deal of time outside while hoping that an interesting bird happens to come along. Aaravsharma23 wanted to participate in that hobby without wasting his time waiting for birds to show up, so he built this AI device to do the birdwatching for him.
To be less flippant, this device is really meant to act as a kind of notification system. If it sees a bird — any bird — it sends Aaravsharma23 an email with a snapshot of the avian target. Aaravsharma23 can then decide if that particular species is worth going outside to see with his own eyes. I don’t know if the birdwatching community considers that cheating or not, but it sure seems more efficient.
This works with by using OpenCV and YOLOv5s, which is pretrained for object recognition. The list of objects it can recognize includes birds. That runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB model) paired with the official Raspberry Pi AI HAT+. That hat provides additional computational resources suited to tasks like these. The Raspberry Pi looks at the environment with a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 (with wide angle lens), panning the camera back and forth with a small hobby servo motor.
The Python script does that while checking frames for birds. If it detects a bird, it sends an email to the preconfigured address. In the future, Aaravsharma23 hopes to make it capable of recognizing specific kinds of birds. But for now, users will probably end up with lots of emails about pigeons. Even so, this could be genuinely appealing to the birdwatchers out there.