Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
Plant Identification => Plant Identification Questions and Answers => Topic started by: Diane Whitehead on August 28, 2017, 03:14:07 AM
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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/ (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?
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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.