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Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

candidegardening.com

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Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#81

Post by jvvw »

phito wrote: post #23
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…

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.

I've used PictureThis a great deal to identify both wild and garden flowers. I've found it really good for the 95% most common plants and also for getting you in the right ballpark so you can then look things up more easily in a field guide. I've just accepted that there are some species that it can't distinguish between - often you need to know exactly the right feature to look at of the plant to differentiate species. It'd be useful though if it flagged this a bit better. Umbellifers are a classic example. It gets them correct more often than not, but I think it'd be good for it to indicate that uncertainty better.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#82

Post by alainv »

xattt wrote: post #64
codingdave wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m trying to understand the business model that PlantNet has. Right now, it’s obviously some sort of exploitative data harvesting - hoarding geotagged plant photos to sell to academic researchers, highlighting hotspots for nature tourism, etc. I was alluding to Apple in my comment, as they are the ones that have a model for their mobile devices being some sort of knowledge lens. They are very easily capable to eat t…

You didn't look very hard[1]. It's a research project funded by grants and donations, and as far as I can tell they give away their databases[2].

[1]: https://plantnet.org/ [2]: http://data.plantnet-project.org/datamanager/_design/dataman...

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#83

Post by bwanab »

nend wrote: post #58
_Microft wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been using an app called PlantNet that works similarly. Upload a photo, tell the app which part of the plant is in the photo (leaf, flower, fruit, bark), and it'll tell you what the plant is. Highly recommended as well, almost always identifies the plant with just one photo. I'll have to check out flora incognita sometime.

I’ve been amazed at how well PlantNet works. It’s identified a number of invasive species in my yard that I’d otherwise have remained ignorant of.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#84

Post by ravila4 »

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.

You need to click on the "Unknown Species" box in order to get a list of suggestions. Probably not the most intuitive, but it avoids auto-assigning IDs without prior review.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#85

Post by xattt »

alainv wrote: post #82
xattt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m trying to understand the business model that PlantNet has. Right now, it’s obviously some sort of exploitative data harvesting - hoarding geotagged plant photos to sell to academic researchers, highlighting hotspots for nature tourism, etc. I was alluding to Apple in my comment, as they are the ones that have a model for their mobile devices being some sort of knowledge lens. They are very easily capable to eat t…

You didn't look very hard[1]. It's a research project funded by grants and donations, and as far as I can tell they give away their databases[2]. [1]: https://plantnet.org/ [2]: http://data.plantnet-project.org/datamanager/_design/dataman...

I tried to look for an explanation of the scope of their project from the FAQ. Since it wasn’t openly included, I assumed it was deliberately omitted.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#87

Post by mobilemidget »

_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…

One of these things I think of when I do garden things, "I bet there is an app for this" but typically as soon as I have left the garden I forget all about it.

I have installed the app now for the next time I am gardening :)

Thanks

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#88

Post by kazinator »

Google's camera app does this in the Lens mode.

I snapped picture of the example picture; it came up with Swiss Cheese Plant.

Don't know how good it is. I've used it maybe seven or eight times in the past for identifying plants; it worked every time.

Most recently, over just this past weekend, it identified an Elm tree from a shot a branch.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#89

Post by raffraffraff »

tgtweak wrote: post #41
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.

Interesting, I can't use Lens. Installed it, but it just says "Thank you for updating. Lens will be available soon"

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#90

Post by trts »

tgtweak wrote: post #41
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.

My success rate with Google Lens is about 80-90%, sometimes doing additional research to confirm between similar results.

With a couple different dedicated apps I had zero success.

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