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Main changes and additions

V 1.3.0

This release has three parts plus a preview of what's next.

Naming changes

Previous name New name Notes
OWL / Overhead Wildlife Locator MegaDetector-Overhead Repo: microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead
PW_Bioacoustics / bioacoustics module MegaDetector-Acoustic Repo: microsoft/MegaDetector-Acoustic
microsoft/CameraTraps microsoft/Biodiversity GitHub repo rename — old URLs redirect automatically
Sparrow Studio SPARROW Studio Capitalization standardized (SPARROW is an acronym)

SPARROW Studio beta

SPARROW Studio is our new graphical frontend — data management, inference, analysis, and annotation in one UI. The Windows MSI installer is available from Zenodo: SPARROW Studio Installer (signed). Mac and Linux builds are in progress.

MegaDetector-Acoustic

MegaDetector-Acoustic is available at microsoft/MegaDetector-Acoustic with CLI scripts for dataset preparation, training, and inference on audio recordings, plus a pre-trained bird classifier (MD_AudioBirds_V1). See the MegaDetector-Acoustic overview, the model-zoo entry, and the end-to-end demo at microsoft/MegaDetector-Acoustic.

MegaDetector-Overhead

A new generalized, point-based detection model for overhead imagery. Two variants are released — MegaDetector-Overhead-T and MegaDetector-Overhead-C — listed in the Other Detectors model zoo. Demo: microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

Looking ahead — PW-Engine

The future of PyTorchWildlife is PW-Engine, a Rust-based, model-agnostic inference core that powers SPARROW Studio and can also be consumed directly via HTTP, CLI, Python bindings, or a native C library. See the PW-Engine overview for what it is, how it fits alongside the current Python API, and how to pilot it.