Z a k e S t a h l
zake
at (no spam) steelrabbit dot com
www.steelrabbit.com/zake/
Please check out my
sample projects and demos at https://chatbot8.steelrabbit.com
Please check out
"Enshittification Metrics" at www.enshittificationmetrics.com
ZakeStahlResume.pdf
www.linkedin.com/in/zakestahl
Enterprise Customer Technical Support Manager
"Maximize customer satisfaction through proficient identification and
resolution of technical issues"
My ideal job is as an individual
contributor, or manager of a team, in a software development or
generative AI or AI as a software/platform company, doing external
customer support or internal SecDevOps.
Hummingbird identification project.
This provides a demo of my engineering, AIPM,
coding, ML, and, sensor to situational awareness pipeline development,
abilities.
Background / Problem to
solve:
I keep a clean, pure sugar-water, hummingbird
feeder going year round. I enjoy watching the bird's territorial battles
and sharing behaviors, seeing the seasonal changes.
Question became, can I use computer vision,
machine learning tech, to track Humming birds?
To see what times of day, times of year, they
visited, frequencies?
Maybe even to distinguish between individual
birds, like (human) face recognition?
Solutions:
(Spin small carrots on left to view / hide solution detail.)
Motion capture software on Raspberry Pi with webcam; raw
with no AI.
"Motion"
software is a rich and mature FOSS package that is highly
tune-able and on it's own got many pictures of Hummingbirds
quite well. It also got thousands of jpgs of the bird feeder
swinging in the wind, and people walking around in the background.
Managing all the pictures generated becomes tedious.
Video pipeline from webcam to inference
against model on Google Coral on Raspberry Pi; edge computing proof of
concept with video.
"GStreamer"
is an amazingly versatile and powerful tool. I was able to stream video
from webcam to inference engine running on Google Coral,
and logged thousands of Humming birds at pretty high confidence
rates. I was unable to satisfactorily 'tee'
a success stream off to a jpg export however, so was not
satisfied with this configuration.
Here are some results,
taken from a few weeks during Northern California spring 2023:
| Time of Day |
Total Count of Birds Inferred |
| 06:00 dawn |
398 |
| 07:00 |
7 |
| 08:00 |
20 |
| 09:00 |
35 |
| 10:00 |
25 |
| 11:00 noon |
106 |
| 12:00 |
87 |
| 13:00 |
29 |
| 14:00 |
39 |
| 15:00 |
55 |
| 16:00 |
101 |
| 17:00 |
87 |
| 18:00 dusk |
153 |
| 19:00 |
7 |
| 20:00 |
1 |
| 21:00 |
1 |
| 22:00 thru 05:00 |
0 |
| Inferenced Label |
Total Count of Birds Inferred |
| Calypte anna (Anna's Hummingbird) |
285 |
| Archilochus
colubris (Ruby-throated Hummingbird) |
234 |
| Selasphorus rufus (Rufous
Hummingbird) |
41 |
| Other Confidently Incorrect Birds |
591 |
Code managing motion capture software and queuing images for
labeling and notifications by inference against multiple models;
edge computing proof of concept with jpgs.
Setup is: webcam on Pi;
Python code running as daemon starts
Motion hours before dawn, and stops it hours after dusk; code
inferences captured images against animals model on Coral
and labels them; as a lower priority non-matching images are tried
against a general object model; total non-matches are purged some days
later; hits for target birds trigger a "ntfy" notification. System
has been successful, capturing hundreds of wonderful Hummingbird
pictures!
Pictures above show red and yellow Humming bird feeder, USB webcam, and
(in upper right of first photo) upside down food storage container
bungee-cabled to downspout. The "58" is percent humidity. In the
enclosure is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and Google Coral USB.
Example photos just below show some recent visitors from the system.
(Cat knows it can't catch the hummingbirds already.):
| Statistics for 2023-05-08 through
2023-11-17: |
| Passer_domesticus_House_Sparrow |
201 |
| Calypte_anna_Anna's_Hummingbird |
114 |
| Buteo_jamaicensis_Red-tailed_Hawk |
78 |
| Haemorhous_mexicanus_House_Finch
|
50 |
| Archilochus_colubris_Ruby-throated_Hummingbird
|
17 |
| Myiopsitta_monachus_Monk_Parakeet |
16 |
| Selasphorus_rufus_Rufous_Hummingbird |
5 |
| Archilochus_alexandri_Black-chinned_Hummingbird
|
2 |
| Selasphorus_sasin_Allen's_Hummingbird |
1 |
Humming bird face recognition - if you come to my feeder, you
give up privacy...; next steps to implement.
Add a layer to neural net and then hand train on individual birds. If
I can tell the difference by eye I can train the computer to do the
same.
Send images right from webcam into AWS SageMaker and see
what I can get out; next steps to implement.
TBD