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)

On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:51:48 -0700 (PDT), johnbibby
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.


Posting a request on here with a link to a clear photograph on a site
such flickr seems to work quite well for most things.

Whilst there are some useful image libraries online and of course
Google, I am not aware of an image ID matching application. For wild
plants I have used this site for some years -
http://www.botanicalkeys.co.uk/flora/content/SEARCH.ASP - which
requires some thought and input but has proved quite useful.

rbel

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.

On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:51:48 -0700 (PDT), johnbibby
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 is an image classification issue. It is far from easy unless the
images have been reduced to common sets of measures. That is why
facial recognition systems work so well. They do not compare the
images, they just compare the sets of measures. Common sets of
measures for images of plant species are not well defined apart from
the original descriptions. The actual images must be compared.

Try the image facilities in my EasyNN-plus software if you want to
experiment.

Steve

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