AI distinguishes birds that even experts can't

sciencehabit writes: It’s a fact of life for birders that some species are fiendishly difficult to tell apart—in particular, the sparrows and drab songbirds dubbed “little brown jobs.” Distinguishing individuals is nearly impossible. Now, a computer program analyzing photos and videos has accomplished that feat. The advance promises to reveal new information on bird behaviors.

The tool, called a convolutional neural network, sifts through thousands of pictures to figure out which visual features can be used to classify a given image; it then uses that information to classify new images. When given photos it hadn’t seen before, the neural network correctly identified individual birds 90% of the time, often better than human experts.