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Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

candidegardening.com

31–40 of 103 posts

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#32

I have an app on my iPhone that works pretty well (PictureThis). Probably does about the same thing as this. I noticed that the following clause in their Ts & Cs: > You grant us an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free right and license to use your Content for the purposes of providing, promoting, developing and trying to improve the Candide Platform and our other services, including new services that we…

I don't work at Candide any more but I was CTO there when this was written. I can assure you you're reading too much into it! Candide is very well set up to protect users' private data, and has a great set of engineers and engineering practices in place ensuring this, as well as, you know, not ever selling data to a third party!

Thanks for the clarification. I know that lawyers spend a lot of time revising these types of sentences; usually with an eye towards exit plans.

I appreciate the authoritative response.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#34

https://plantnet.org/en/

I have been using plantnet for a few years and have been pretty happy with it. The ability to contribute+validate your identification is great. It does fail sometimes but it's pretty good, and the UI has improved in recent releases.

I have to agree on PlantNet. It is good enough to come up with a general name of a plant (ragwort), that you can then look up in a local plant guidebook to find out the specific variety (common ragwort).

Hopefully, a privacy-friendly phone (ie Apple) manufacturer acquires them and does deep OS integration with the app.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. This kind of thing is only going to work on very common plants that are easy to ID. I am very into carnivorous plants and even us experts sometimes have trouble identifying plants, often you need very specific morphological details to ID species that a phone picture will never be able to catch. IMO this will just lead people to wrongly ID their plants more often than not, and that's a really bad thing.

The iNaturalist app does a spectacular job at identifying plants (and insects, fish, birds…), even disambiguating based on your location You label geotagged images with the AIs suggestion if you agree with it and then other users can either confirm or suggest a different / more specific species.

You got me curious, so I tried that app, and I'm getting "Unknown species" for every single one of my plants... I guess no identification is better than bad identification.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#36
post #19

Nice concept. Unfortunately, I have tried to identify some of my plants but it could not identify correctly a single one. Just an endless procession of at best similar plants, most of the time completely dissimilar. I think this is another naive model that just tries to push entire problem to AI. That is unfortunately what I am seeing nowadays, very unimaginative. Just try to have fun with parameters of the network u…

To be honest, nothing works better than Plantnet for identifying plants. They do the pre-selection where you choose wich organ you're looking at (trunk, leaf, flower, fruit, ...).

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#38
post #26
post #19

Nice concept. Unfortunately, I have tried to identify some of my plants but it could not identify correctly a single one. Just an endless procession of at best similar plants, most of the time completely dissimilar. I think this is another naive model that just tries to push entire problem to AI. That is unfortunately what I am seeing nowadays, very unimaginative. Just try to have fun with parameters of the network u…

>What it would benefit from would be some kind of analysis/classification of basic features of the plants like what's the basic shape of the leaf, trunk, how things are connected, etc. There's no reason to think that needs to be done separately, and in fact that's the kind of things that you'd expect a good model to find on its own. In general, we've already learned that while handcrafted features can help, they are…

> There's no reason to think that needs to be done separately, and in fact that's the kind of things that you'd expect a good model to find on its own.

Disagree - learning to classify morphological characteristics is learning the generalizable features. Especially given that some plants are going to have relatively few photos, knowing with high confidence some diagnostic factors and GPS could absolutely outperform the brute force approach.

This isn’t about hand tuned features, it’s about predicting the right thing.

Also, the approaches aren’t mutually exclusive.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iNaturalist app does a spectacular job at identifying plants (and insects, fish, birds…), even disambiguating based on your location You label geotagged images with the AIs suggestion if you agree with it and then other users can either confirm or suggest a different / more specific species.

You got me curious, so I tried that app, and I'm getting "Unknown species" for every single one of my plants... I guess no identification is better than bad identification.

It is an important feature. For plants, users will immediately see that the answer is wrong but for many other things (identifying suspects automatically) it might not be as obvious.

As a bonus if the algorithm can tell it can't identify correctly you can use this feedback to teach the algorithm.

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