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Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

candidegardening.com

51–60 of 103 posts

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#53
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.

Are they garden plants?

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#55
Understandably people are realizing that it's now much easier to discover what plants (and animals, and fungus, etc.) exist around you and whether they're special in some way.

But when picking apps to accomplish that task, I suggest selecting for those that respect your privacy (because a lot of these plant observations involve GPS location), are clear about how the machine learning datasets are trained and what's being done with the data you're supplying, and lastly how these apps and companies are funded.

PictureThis is owned by https://www.glority.com

Candide appears to be a UK startup: https://candidegardening.com/GB/about

iNaturalist and their Seek app (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app) is a joint venture between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about

Moreover both iNaturalist (https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist) and Seek (https://github.com/inaturalist/SeekReactNative) are open source. The former is a Rails app, and the latter a React Native app with no account registration system making it safe and legal to use for children since all observations are stored in-device by default unless you chose to send them to your iNaturalist account to share with the community.

On functionality alone it's extremely rare for Seek not to recognize an organism (yeah, it's not just plants) and when it is, I simply send the observation to iNaturalist whose network of naturalists both amateur and professional usually manage to definitively identify my observations within a few hours. Here's a recent example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86844469

The iNaturalist community itself is fascinating and quite transparent with detailed site stats (https://www.inaturalist.org/stats) and a clear mission statement ( https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/what+is+it): > iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature

At a time where biodiversity is more threatened than ever, I welcome any tool to help folks identify and value the organisms around us, but if you're going to pick one, my recommendation is iNat & Seek.

PS: I'm not affiliated to iNaturalist in any way other than as a happy user.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#56
post #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, ...).

Plantnet is a gem, they don't even want you to "register"/"connect with FB/Google" for "tracking" purposes

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#57
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…

Thanks for pointing out!

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#58
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…

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.

Re: Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

#59
post #28
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

AIs are useful for "fuzzy" problems, but are not very good at doing precise things with high reliability. Every plant has baked in restrictions on how it grows. If you can identify separate features of a leaf and how the leaf grows out of the stem you can basically look it up in a table and tell what kind of tree you are looking at, without need for guessing. On the other hand AI will develop its own classification m…

Would it be possible to train the model to identify the features and then just have it run those through a trie of plant classifications? Trying to bake classifications into the model does seem silly but you still need an element of computer vision if you want to do this.
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