‘Smart birdhouses’ that tell what their inhabitants eat. Jacob Kamminga from Peize is busy with this as a researcher at the University of Twente. He develops the technology for the birdhouses.
The birdhouses are part of a ten-year project to get a better picture of the biodiversity in our country. By recording what the birds eat, the smart boxes also offer a view of the species that live around such a house. And thus on the biodiversity in that place.
Thanks to a sensor, the camera in the roof of the birdhouse switches on automatically as soon as a bird flies inside. For example, a nest box makes hundreds of videos a day of birds with food in their beaks. Researchers cut these videos into photos. In the near future, tens of thousands of photos will be given a label, such as ‘spider’ or ‘caterpillar’.
Kamminga is developing an algorithm to automatically recognize the prey. He will use tens of thousands of screenshots to teach the algorithm what can be seen in the images. The more beaks with crumpled spiders and crushed caterpillars the algorithm has ‘seen’, the better it recognizes prey. Ultimately, the algorithm must independently attach the labels to the images, so that a report appears every day of what comes into a birdhouse.
“It saves a lot of time,” says Kamminga. “We wanted to measure on a large scale and that is only possible if you make the nesting box or the sensor in general smarter.”
The NOS visited Jacob Kamminga and his birdhouses: