Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo • Hacker News Board

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#41

Post by tgtweak » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 12:50 PM UTC

monkeynotes wrote: post #39

Google lens does a pretty good job of identifying plants, along with everything else. I use it a lot in our garden and a majority of the time it correctly identifies.

There is really very little need for 3rd party apps on this. I've yet to stump lens on any Fauna or Flora in my neck of the woods. I suspect it is location aware, which gives it a pretty big edge in filtering out duplicates.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#42

Post by codingdave » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 12:58 PM UTC

xattt wrote: post #34

riffraff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not understanding why you say that being purchased by a phone manufacturer would be better - wouldn't the optimal solution be to expose any features from the OS that the app could need, while leaving the app developers their independence?

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#43

Post by Jolter » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:03 PM UTC

So, what’s the monetization strategy? What data am I giving up if I use this app, and how will they use it?

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#44

Post by amarant » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:03 PM UTC

Google lens can already do this. It identifies other things too, which is nice. And from my very limited testing lens is more accurate.

I guess this is nice for the "cancel Google" crowd though...

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#45

Post by _Microft » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

ahhhndi wrote: post #37

German research project doing same for free: https://floraincognita.com/?noredirect=en_US

Flora Incognita is great. Very recommended!

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#46

Post by acheron » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #10

keithnz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my partner used one called PictureThis and it identified most of all the plants around our property here in New Zealand ( mix of natives and introduced), it got ones that were a complete mystery to us.

I used to use PictureThis until they started requiring a login in order to use it. Then I switched to LeafSnap, which works great.

I started using PictureThis recently and do not need a login or anything. Works pretty well at least in my yard and nearby parks.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#47

Post by abeppu » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

phito wrote: post #35

jazzyjackson wrote: post #30

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.

Is it perhaps also a difference in intended use? If iNaturalist is for wildlife and uses location heavily, eg identifying tropical houseplants indoors in a different region might not work.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#48

Post by bottled_poe » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

lmilcin wrote: post #40

phito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A great example of this is the Akinator app. The developers built up a database of answers by getting the users to fill in the missing data, which produced more accurate results and subsequently attracted more users. That feedback loop for apps like this seems like a very effective model. What I find interesting about this is that the value of the product, from a business perspective, comes from the success of the software in enabling that feedback loop, while from the user’s perspective, the value is in the data. But the data is emergent from the feedback algorithm.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#49

Post by _Microft » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

lmilcin wrote: 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…

Flora Incognita, a free plant identification app for Android and iOS, developed by a German university, does that.

You choose a category first, like "tree", "flower", "grass" or "fern" and it will guide you through the process, trying to identify the plant with as few photos as necessary. Common ones it will identify from a single image, for others, it will e.g. prompt to take a close-up photo of the bark, bloom or the complete plant in its environment. From what I understand, they are aiming for accuracy of the identification and will provide a description of possibly matching plants if there is still ambiguity. Very recommended!

Edit: here is a link if it sounds interesting: https://floraincognita.com

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#50

Post by swader999 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #49

lmilcin wrote: 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…

Flora Incognita, a free plant identification app for Android and iOS, developed by a German university, does that. You choose a category first, like "tree", "flower", "grass" or "fern" and it will guide you through the process, trying to identify the plant with as few photos as necessary. Common ones it will identify from a single image, for others, it will e.g. prompt to take a close-up photo of the bark, bloom or t…

This will bolster my fantasy of living off the land like the savage I want to be.