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Having the computer count birds in a photo (1 Viewer)

Christof

Learning nature photographer and birder
Hey all,

out of curiosity when looking at a photo I had taken of a flock of rooks last winter, I wondered just how many birds I had on this one frame. Not being versed in quickly estimating numbers of birds, I started to count and then stopped - surly a machine can do this better than I!

I had some fun with image processing software to come up with 535 rooks:
http://alpenglow.info/2012/08/07/how-to-count-the-birds-in-a-photo-of-a-flock-automatically/

Now the question - I have looked for other hints at how to do this properly, or if there is even better suited software out there, without success. I might be missing the correct search terms, or maybe it is only the scientific subsection of birders who do this?

Any pointers to more information appreciated!

Greetings,
Christof
 
Photoshop (Extended version) includes a Count Tool, never used it but worth a try. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photosh...ehind) it gives 593 for the rooks in the sky.
 
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Hi Mono!

Thanks for the hint - I had completely overlooked that, despite CS3 extended sitting here on my hard disk. The UI is most peculiar though, and without the help files you would never guess there *is* automatic counting built into it...

Running Photoshop on a second image gave me hard time with reflections of birds on the water, which I could successfully remove with ImageJ's erode filter.

I used the manual photoshop counting tool to set a ground truth of 291 ducks, and used the dotcount getting a result of 281, and ImageJ 298 with about a similar amount of effort. Not bad, getting within 3-4% with the image processing.

Photoshop counted 1076, and the main problem is that you seemingly cannot set thresholds for the size of the dots it should look for (dotcount has upper and lower size sliders, and ImageJ lets you specify the squarepixel range of the dots you're looking for) - so naturally Photoshop found too many with lots of tiny bits that you'd want it to overlook.

One trick with dotcount I found was that it was not built for today's megapixel images - the maximum dot size you can set is too small. After I rescaled the image to 25% of the original, it worked like a charm.

I probably prefer ImageJ so far, because it gives you finer control and the additional erode / dilate capability. Will try both tools on more images, though.

Cheers!
Christof
 
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