automatic plant ID with PlantSnap

[Diane Whitehead]

Eric Ralls of Colorado, USA, has developed a plant identification app that so far
can identify over 300,000 plants, and he is continuing to add more.

I saw him demo it on his website - http://plantsnap.net/

I guess the database resides up in a cloud and your phone or iPad beams up
your photo and returns with the name.

Has anyone tried it?

[David Lyttle]

Interesting; I was involved in a project for the identification of New Zealand trees called Flora Finder. The idea was that you could take a photo of a leaf on your mobile device and match to a corresponding image in a database using what I gather were alogorithms similar to those used in facial recognition soft ware. It worked up to a point but needed a conventional botanical key to be built into the app to refine it.

I do a lot of plant identifications for the New Zealand version of the iNaturalist website and find with a good photo showing detail of the key taxonomic features identification is relatively straight forward. With a blurry cell phone image making an accurate identification can be difficult if not impossible. I am guessing any computer-based system using AI techniques would be face with similar limitations.