In message
,
johnbibby writes
On 23 July, 23:14, kay wrote:
johnbibby;930879 Wrote:

Does anyone know a gizmo that will identify plants from a photo?

Compared with other things that have been developed *- e.g. to
distinguish between two twin brothers - distinguishing between plant
species seems rather easy, yet I cannot find any such thing referred
to on the web.

JOHN BIBBY (York)

It sounds easy, but is it? If you are distinguishing between human
faces, you have some fixed feature to start with - eg your computer can
probably identify eyes relatively easily, and from there start making
measurements to mouth and nose and chin and so on and therefore pick up
differences. But there's a lot more variety in a plant leaf or flower
than in a human face, and it may not be easy for the computer to get a
fix on a feature to start making comparisons. And that's assuming you
have taken a carefully posed photo of just a flower and a leaf, rather
than a shot of the whole plant with leaves and flowers all over the
place.

--
kay

Hi Kay

You may be right, and it may notr be as easy as I suggest. However,
the equivalent with people is that all I'm asking for is a gizmo that
will see a person and will say "That's a human" i.e. to identify the
species, not which particular member of that species.

It's true that face-recognition uses 'landmarks' such as eyes, nose,
mouth. But surely something could be done e.g. by shape of leaf or
fruit.

Even if it is difficult, I would expect the question to have been
POSED before, yet I can find no mention of it on the web. (I'm sure
it's there somewhe searching is difficult when you are unsure what
Google terms to search on.)

The question has been posed. Try searching for automated leaf
identification.

There are about half a million species of plants, each of which varies.
So you'd need a pretty large training dataset, and a pretty big
database. If you want to identify cultivated plants, which are often
highly divergent from their parents, and/or of hybrid origins, that's
even more data needed.

Working from photographs of say leaves loses information. I distinguish
Solidago canadensis from Solidago gigantea by leaf texture (and both of
these are species complexes, not single species). I distinguish
Persicaria mitis from Persicaria hydropiper by taste.

Thanks for your comments
JOHN

--
Stewart Robert Hinsley