It may be good news for air-traffic controllers that an international team of researchers has pronounced new radar software highly effective in differentiating signals from birds and swarms of insects, a problem that stumped previous efforts to automatically tell the two apart.
London, March 12 : It may be good news for air-traffic controllers that an international team of researchers has pronounced new radar software highly effective in differentiating signals from birds and swarms of insects, a problem that stumped previous efforts to automatically tell the two apart.
Serge Zaugg of the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach says that the new computer algorithm, which has the ability to spot birds nearly continually, is based on data-mining techniques, statistical analysis, and artificial intelligence.
He and his colleagues-experts from research institutions in France, the Netherlands and Germany-have fed the program thousands of bird and insect radar signals, which had already been identified by human experts and verified with visual observations.
The signals came from flocks of birds or insects, or a mix of birds and insects, flying over the Sahara desert in Mauritania in 2003 and 2004.
Zaugg says that the training has enabled the program to identify signals it has never seen before with 93 to 98 per cent accuracy.
The researcher points out that, though trained technicians can recognize subtle pulses in the signals caused by bird's beating wings to tell them apart, this task become extremely difficult when such experts face large, mixed flocks of birds and insects. If you have to spend several seconds on every signal and you have tens of thousands of signals, it can take months to separate the birds from the insects," New Scientist magazine quoted him as saying.
Kenneth Rosenberg of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Ithaca, New York, says that a automatic tool to distinguish between birds and insects may also prove beneficial for biologists studying bird migration.
"Having a system that can quickly and correctly distinguish between birds and insects would be extremely beneficial for air-traffic controllers and biologists interested in bird migration," Rosenberg says.
"Radar is potentially one of the most powerful tools we have to study bird movements, especially at night when we can't see them," Rosenberg adds.
A report describing the new computer algorithm has been published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
ANI