By sight

The only sense that can say which animal

Sound and heat tell you something is there. Only a photograph can tell you what it was — and the naming happens on the phone, offline, with the picture never sent away.

When something wakes the camera it takes one photograph at full resolution. A small detector puts a box around the animal, and a camera-trap classifier names what is inside the box. Both run on the phone’s processor; neither needs a signal, and the photograph is never uploaded to be recognised.

The box is not optional. The classifier scores 13 % on whole frames and 97 % on crops, because an animal occupies a median two and a half per cent of a picture. Finding it first is most of the work.

And it is allowed to decline. A confidence floor drops weak answers, and the model’s vaguer verdicts are rejected outright — “mammal” tells an owner less than “animal, unidentified” while sounding more certain.

Where it stops. It needs light: a visible flash reaches three to ten metres, and some animals dislike it. And the animal must be reasonably large in frame — below about a twentieth of the picture, nothing is named at all.

What we support

The phone’s own camera, which every Android has, and optionally a USB camera for setups where the phone cannot face the right way.

What	Status	Notes
The phone’s own camera	Supported	Any Android 8 or newer. The default, and the one that costs nothing.
USB UVC cameras	Supported	Standard video-class devices. The Sonix `0c45:6369` is named outright for phones whose matching stops at the device descriptor.
Infrared camera with an illuminator	Planned	Would carry sight into the dark without a flash an animal can see. The hardware is not chosen; the wavelength has to match the sensor or the picture is black.

What we have tested

Ourselves, on real hardware. Tested means we have run it and can say what happened. Should work means the protocol matches and nobody has tried it yet. We do not merge the two.

Tested	Result	Notes
Oukitel WP61 camera	Works	Our main field phone
Redmi Note 8T camera	Problems	Captures fail far more often than they succeed on this handset. Being investigated; listed here rather than left off.
Naming accuracy	30 of 31	Real infrared trail-camera photographs of fox, badger and a dog, taken about five metres from a feed. The single miss was a geographic filter letting through an animal from the wrong continent.

This is the sense that turns a sighting into knowledge. “Something warm came at 02:52” is a curiosity; “a badger came at 02:52” is the beginning of knowing what lives where you live. People protect what they know about, and a name is where knowing starts — which is why we would rather say nothing than say the wrong one.

A measured warning about shortcuts. Shrinking the classifier to a quarter of its size — the obvious way to make it faster on a phone — took it from 30 of 31 to 0 of 31. It answered “blank” for every animal, confidently. We ship the larger model because the small one is not a worse answer, it is no answer at all.