Ornimetrics
A bird feeder that knows who's eating. It names the species, feeds each one its own portion, spots birds that need help and learns its regulars, all on a Raspberry Pi.
- Since
- 2024, founder and sole developer
- Paper
- First author · CS & IT Vol. 16 · ADCOM 2026
- Patent
- U.S. application filed 2026
- Model
- Open on Hugging Face
The feeder, modelled and animated in Spline. Drag to look around it.
Why
The end of the scramble
An ordinary tray is first come, first served: bullies crowd out timid birds, squirrels empty it, and leftover seed rots. Ornimetrics decides who eats.
In action
Watch it feed
Parts tour
Four parts
Dispensing mechanism. A rotating disk with two pockets meters the seed out in exact amounts, and an incline under it pours the portion gently onto the tray. This is the mechanism behind the patent.
Tray. Shaped so birds can grip the edge while they eat their portion. Five 3 mm screws lock the dispensing mechanism to it, carrying the weight of the seed and the birds.
Feed storage. The hopper on top holds the seed and feeds the disk below it by gravity.
Camera housing. Holds the camera right at the tray, under the hopper, so every bird that lands is in frame.
All four modelled and animated in Spline. Drag to turn them.
How it sees
One backbone, three answers
- 0.93
- mAP@50, the feeder detector
- 86.9%
- top-1 over 555 species
- 0.963
- AUC spotting injured birds, with no injured photos in training
- 45,000+
- training images
| Model | What it is | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Detector | YOLOv11n, INT8, compiled for the Hailo-8 | 0.93 mAP@50 at about 30 fps |
| Species | EfficientNetV2-S fine-tuned on NABirds | 86.9% top-1 over 555 species |
| Species (open) | The same network on Creative Commons photos | 302 species, licensed for commercial use |
| Welfare | Learns what healthy birds look like and measures how far a new one sits from it | AUC 0.963 injured, 0.974 dead |
| Re-ID | ArcFace embeddings with a gallery per species | Enrols new regulars automatically |
Published
The paper
Tested at the feeder itself: how often it named the bird, and how much seed each species left behind.
Correct identifications, 100 trials per species
Uneaten seed per feeding session, 15 trials
Sparrows waste the most, which is exactly what per-species portions are for.
CS & IT Conference Proceedings, Vol. 16 · presented at the 12th International Conference on Advanced Computing (ADCOM 2026), Vancouver, February 2026
Ornimetrics: Design and Evaluation of an AI-Enabled Smart Bird Feeder for Species Recognition, Waste Reduction, and Ecological Monitoring
What it grew into
