An app to make you an avid bird watcher

For the uninitiated and the novice in bird watching, here comes an electronic field guide in the form of an app that would help you spot a new feathered friend.

Aptly christened Birdsnap, the free app enables users to identify bird species through uploaded photos, accompanies a visually beautiful, comprehensive website that includes some 50,000 images.

Birdsnap, which also features birdcalls for each species, offers users numerous ways to organise species-alphabetically, by their relationship in the Tree of Life, and by the frequency with which they are sighted at a particular place and season.

The researchers developed Birdsnap using computer vision and machine learning techniques.

"Our goal is to use computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a digital field guide that will help people learn to recognise birds," said Peter Belhumeur, a computer science professor at Columbia University.

"We have been able to take an incredible collection of data-thousands of photos of birds-and use technology to organise the data in a useful and fun way," Belhumeur added.

The app features 500 of the most common North American bird species.