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Devank Garg, Panshul, Lakshya Jain, Prashasti Sharma

Birds Species Classification

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necessary decisions. Machine Learning algorithms are trained
over instances or examples through which they learn from past
I. INTRODUCTION experiences and analyse the historical data. As it trains over

A
lthough bird classification can be done manually by
domain experts, with growing amounts of data, this
rapidly becomes a tedious and time-consuming process. So, by
this model we can identify the species of the birds accurately
and in less time. In our application, the user needs to input the
image of the bird, and our model will predict the species of the
bird.
Dataset- We used Birds 450 species Image Classification
datasets. It is a dataset of 450 bird species, 70,626 training
images, 22500 test images(5 images per species) and 2250
validation images(5 images per species. This is a high quality
dataset where there is only one bird in each image and the bird
typically takes up at least 50% of the pixels in the image. As a
result even a moderately complex model will achieve training
and test accuracies in the mid 90% range. All images are 224
X 224 X 3 color images in jpg format. Data set includes a train
set, test set and validation set.
the examples, again and again, it is able to identify patterns in
order to make decisions more accurately
C. Computation saving
The ReLu function is able to accelerate the training speed of
deep neural networks compared to traditional activation
functions since the derivative of ReLu is 1 for a positive input.
Due to a constant, deep neural networks do not need to take
additional time for computing error terms during training
phase.
D. Depth wise Separable Convolutional Neural Networks
Convolution is a very important mathematical operation in
artificial neural networks(ANN’s). Convolutional neural
networks (CNN’s) can be used to learn features as well as
classify data with the help of image frames. There are many
types of CNN’s. One class of CNN’s are depth wise separable
convolutional neural networks.

II. APPROACH
We used MobileNet from other various models like
VGG16, AlexNet, GoogleNet. We selected last 20 layers from
total 28 layers. Then we augmented the data using the keras
ImageDataGenerator. We have used adam optimizer and
categorical crossentropy and accuracy as performance matrix.
After setting the epoch size to 64 and batch size to 64 and
steps per epochs to len(train_data), we were able to reduce the
training time of the model from 12-15 hours to 3-5 hours at
the cost of 2% accuracy, later we tested our model on several
different bird species and every time we got correct results.
We found out that it is important to remove non-linearities
in the narrow layers in order to maintain representational
power. We demonstrate that this improves performance and
provide an intuition that led to this design.
These type of CNN’s are widely used because of the
following two reasons –
1. They have lesser number of parameters to adjust as
compared to the standard CNN’s, which reduces
overfitting
2. They are computationally cheaper because of fewer
computations which makes them suitable for mobile
vision applications
E. Categorical Crossentropy
Categorical crossentropy is a loss function that is used in
multi-class classification tasks. These are tasks where an
example can only belong to one out of many possible
categories, and the model must decide which one.
III. RESULTS

A. MobileNet We were successfully able to predict the species of the

birds from their respective pictures.
This significantly reduces the number of parameters when
compared to the network with regular convolutions with the
same depth in the nets. This increases the efficiency of CNN
to predict images and hence they can be able to compete in the
mobile systems as well. It reduces the comparison and
recognition time a lot, and thus it provides a better response in
a very short time.

B. Machine Learning
Machine Learning is the most popular technique of
predicting or classifying information to help people in making
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IV. UI V. REFERENCES

[1] Tayal, Madhuri, Atharva Mangrulkar, Purvashree Waldey, and

Chitra
Dangra. 2018. “Bird Identification by Image Recognition.” Helix 8(6):
4349–4352.
[2] Albustanji, Abeer. 2019. “Veiled-Face Recognition Using Deep
Learning.” Mutah University.
[3] Alter, Anne L, and Karen M Wang. 2017. “An Exploration of
Computer
Vision Techniques for Bird Species Classification.”.
[4] Atanbori, John et al. 2018. “Classification of Bird Species from
Video
Using Appearance and Motion Features” Ecological Informatics 48: 12–
23.
[5] Brownlee, Jason. 2016. “How To Use Classification Machine Learning
Algorithms in Weka.” Retrieved from https://machinelearningmastery.
com/use-classification-machine-learning-algorithms-weka/.