In this entry we are very pleased to welcome back Tim Hunt from the Centre for Information Technology at Wintec. He has an update for us on his work in automatically detecting Morepork (Ruru) from audio recordings made by our bird monitors.

The Eastern Bays Songbird project has been going for 2 years and the members were keen to see how they were getting on with their goal of predator eradication. They have been using a 2040 Thermal Camera developed by The Cacophony Project to see what is going on around their traps.

Our previous blog post showed a simple model to allow you to work out trap interaction rates. The goal of this post is to show that this same simple model can also be used to explain the effectiveness of aerial poison drops.

Over the last three years we have had various versions of our thermal cameras in front of all the main types of traps. What we have found is that a large number of predators seem to just walk on past irrespective of what type of lures and set ups we use.

As part of our testing we often put our cameras in front of existing traps to see if we can work out the pros and cons of different tools.

Shaun from our commercial partner 2040 Ltd has just published a new blog article which covers a host of recent developments with the Cacophony Project's Thermal Camera. He mentions the new thermal lens design, our progress with running the AI classifier on the camera, the new "Power Tagging" web interface and more.

The first version of the Cacophony Index is now live. The Cacophony Project was first started to attempt to answer a seemingly simple question: "is a bird population getting better or worse over time?". We now have a tool available which can start to answer this question.

We recently came across a new and very cool piece of research which investigated the effectiveness of conventional trial cameras for detecting various North American mammals. To conserve power, trail cameras stay asleep most of the time and use a basic motion sensor to wake the camera up to take photos.

Throughout August and September 2019, The Cacophony Project ran an experiment exploring the efficacy of various audio and scent lures in attracting, and capturing, rats.

Conventional trail cameras are cheap and offer high image resolutions. They are designed for detecting larger animals such as pigs and deer. Thermal cameras, like those used by the Cacophony Project, are much more expensive and typically have lower resolution. Conventional cameras need an IR light source to "see" at night while thermal cameras do not.

Some of the predator monitoring and trapping solutions we are developing require more power than traditional tools. This article explores why we think the effectiveness of tools is more important than power use for most of the applications we are interested in.

We're really excited about 2040, a social venture that is commercialising the technologies developed by the Cacophony Project. They've recently published a blog article about some ongoing research by Tim Hunt from Wintec who is using audio recordings gathered by the Bird Monitor product to automatically detect and identify morepork calls.

We have created a new tool that allows us to test many different methods to lure and capture predators of any type, using sound and thermal vision. We are calling this tool the Cacophony Predator Lab.

Through the use of a Kalman filter, there has been a significant reduction in noise and better handling of occlusion when following an animal's movement. Kalman filters are a powerful tool which can be used to predict the current and future state of a system using the weighting between the sensor input uncertainty and previous estimate uncertainty. Kalman filters are computationally efficient and well suited to embedded system applications.

Recent testing of the Cacophony Project's thermal camera has reinforced how good this type of technology is for predator monitoring and control. This blog post highlights the core reasons that the thermal camera developed by The Cacophony Project is a great technology for this application.

Last week, Menno Finlay-Smits from the Cacophony Project participated on a Techweek 2019 panel which was centred on the idea of "Tech for Good".

We have continued the rat detection experiments recently described on this blog and have updated results to report.

The Cacophony Project were honoured to be awarded the Best Hi-Tech Solution for the Public Good at the NZ Hi-Tech Awards gala on Friday night.