[HN Gopher] PlantNet - App that helps identify plants from pictures
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PlantNet - App that helps identify plants from pictures
Author : shrikant
Score : 341 points
Date : 2020-04-25 08:27 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plantnet.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (plantnet.org)
| wiremaus wrote:
| Been using PlantNet for a few years, rather surprised to see it
| up here.
|
| It's probably the best of its kind, as long as your photos are
| sharp and well lit.
|
| For scientific identification you still absolutely want to verify
| with a dichotomous key, but it's really good for quickly getting
| genus.
|
| Out in nature, you can cross-check with something like
| https://wildflowersearch.org/ to help verify that you have the
| correct species.
| xvilka wrote:
| Reminds me of a similar project - Diatoms[1].
|
| [1] https://diatoms.org/
| drchewbacca wrote:
| I tried their plant identification game. I think they could
| really benefit from hiring a game designer.
|
| It would be possible to make something pretty cool out of the
| database I think.
| habosa wrote:
| Is there a good plant ID app that's not based on my camera? I was
| thinking something that will ask me increasingly specific
| questions. "Where are you?" "What kind of bark does is have?"
| "How large are the leaves?" Etc
| plumeria wrote:
| Probably a book rather than an app. Search for something like
| "Field Guide to Plants in <location>".
| detaro wrote:
| In book form that'd be called a "plant key" or "identification
| key". I can't recommend anything specifically, but maybe that
| helps with the search?
| asaibx wrote:
| The Virginia Tech Tree ID app is quite good, although it only
| covers North American species.
|
| https://dendro.cnre.vt.edu/dendrology/idit.htm
| philote wrote:
| I've had this app a while and just used it to identify Eastern
| Skunk Cabbage growing near me. I didn't know that some plants
| could be thermogenic.
|
| This app seems to work pretty well. I tried this identification
| first on a single leaf and only got results for plantains. But
| using a pic of the whole plant got an accurate ID.
| [deleted]
| AnonC wrote:
| I've tried Seek by iNaturalist [1] to identify some plants in
| real time (the app can also identify fungi and wildlife). It's
| been a bit hit or miss sometimes. I like that it doesn't require
| any registration and doesn't collect any data. I'd like to know
| how this compares (at least for plants).
|
| [1]: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Neat :) I just had a little play with that in our garden it got
| things like himalayan clematis, forget-me-nots, dafodils and
| chives right. Will have to try on mushrooms etc!
|
| Sometimes when it didn't seem to give a high accurate match it
| says 'dicots' for the family.
|
| It said hemp family for my hops, I guess it's hard to get an
| exact match of hops, unless they're flowering I guess. But
| impressed it got that, it seems a hard problem!
|
| Edit: it did get hops eventually after trying a different angle
| :)
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I heard about this app on the radio yesterday and I literally
| just got back inside from using it to identify a plant outside
| my house. It worked ok. when I went to install it, there were a
| number of other apps that came up in the app store and I
| downloaded picturethis which identified the plant instantly
| whereas inaturalist gave me a list of possible plants to pick
| from. picturethis has some in subscription stuff going on that
| I didn't look into tough.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I haven't tried Seek, but I've had better luck with animals
| than with plants on iNaturalist, personally. It's useful to
| algorithmically ID the plant family.
| wiremaus wrote:
| Myco-nerd here: absolutely never rely on the image recognition
| apps for fungi ID.
|
| There are fungi in entire different genera that are VERY
| morphologically similar, and the apps are just not there yet --
| likely won't be for a few dozen years.
|
| An app can make a lethal mistake much easier than a human.
| boulos wrote:
| I've used Google Lens as "if it says unsafe, definitely
| unsafe". I would not rely on it for "oh yeah, I can eat this"
| :).
|
| I doubt your "few dozen years" though. Humans are only so
| good at it themselves. Computing has improved a lot since
| 1984 (3 dozen years ago), and so I'd wager that by 2050 we
| can be better than human at "Eat or not?" for fungi. Up for a
| longbets.org wager? :)
| thatcat wrote:
| Other sensors combined with photo would likely be the
| solution and the results might not be instant for some
| samples.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I mean the thing about fungi is that the tops can look the
| same and you just need to do a spore print to positivity
| distinguish one from another. There may be some mushrooms
| which are simply impossible to tell apart by outward
| appearance. In one of the fast.ai lectures Jeremy shows how
| to distinguish different breeds of cats. Then he shows how
| to look at the confusion matrix, and he found one pair of
| breeds the network really struggled with. It turns out they
| look really similar to him too, and when he researched
| further he found they're simply hard to tell apart. Perhaps
| with an enormous data set there might be small differences
| a network could detect, but the confidence might still be
| low.
|
| And given that mushrooms can kill you, it may simply never
| be advisable to rely on any photo based identification.
| boulos wrote:
| I don't consider it against the rules of the bet to allow
| multiple pictures, including the underside and perhaps
| even "here, smush the mushroom on a piece of paper and
| take a picture of that". My question is can a vision-
| based AI thing outperform humans within another thirty
| years, not if it can do it via a mechanism that isn't
| discriminating.
|
| For all the myco folks here: Do you have a sense of
| whether or not the multiple hours mentioned is "required"
| or "just" makes it easier to get a strong signal? (That
| is, how much is the signal boost due to our inability to
| see well as humans)
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_print
| homerowilson wrote:
| We foragers and amateur mycologists use smell, touch
| (slimy, dry, etc,) sometimes taste (bitter, acrid,...),
| habitat (on wood, ground, type of wood, is there a bulb
| below ground or a root-like structure, time of year,
| spore prints, sometimes color change due to drops of
| chemicals (especially on boletes), sometimes even
| microscopes to view spores, and more.
|
| all of these variables could of course be coded for a
| good classification algorithm.
|
| just saying, it's often more than simply visual.
| growt wrote:
| I tried something similar with Google auto ml a while back.
| Although I'm no ml expert, I think it's quite difficult to
| identify plants. There are many different parameters like
| distance, flowering or not or even time of the year. In some
| cases it can also be quite dangerous to mix up plants, like wild
| garlic and lilly of the valley ( I hope I translated those right)
| 101008 wrote:
| I misread it as "identify planets from your pictures" :)
| Fiahil wrote:
| For french speakers, you can follow the Tela Botanica Mooc on
| botanic here : https://mooc.tela-
| botanica.org/course/view.php?id=12
| clemParis wrote:
| Thanks!
| underyx wrote:
| I've been using https://plant.id/ for this. It's also the first
| and maybe only time I've seen my camera viewfinder embedded in a
| mobile browser!
| varshithr wrote:
| Please forgive me. A Shazam for plants?
| stev3 wrote:
| Yes, exactly. :-)
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I can already see how future ML platforms going to gain a lot
| from crowdsourced data.
|
| Imagine a platform that can publish an app for classification of
| any particular use case, and the dataset is contributed and
| vetted by the community of users
|
| For example: 1. App for identifying animals ( like inaturalist )
| 2. App for identifying a car/bike model versions 3. App for
| identifying languages and translate 4. App for identifying
| different kinds of dogs
| dylan604 wrote:
| All these apps need to do is come up with a CAPTCHA like
| implementation. If you hated "Find all crosswalks", just wait
| for "Find all Lilium longiflorum".
| kekebo wrote:
| Semi related: goes well with https://birdnet.cornell.edu/ for
| bird song identification.
| marksandmethods wrote:
| good website https://www.marksandmethods.com
| CarVac wrote:
| Google Lens has done this decently for me in the past.
| MKais wrote:
| "Nozha Boujemaa is the scientific co-leader with Daniel
| Barthelemy (CIRAD) of Pl@ntNet project"
|
| https://project.inria.fr/nozhaboujemaa/
| nateburke wrote:
| I've been trying to determine whether the oak in my front yard is
| a scarlet oak or a pin oak. The two varieties have very similar
| leaves.
|
| According to the app rankings, based on acorn, leaf, and flower
| pics, it is a downy oak. Not perfect, but I am impressed that it
| picked up that it was an oak at all.
| rmason wrote:
| Thirty years ago I was walking farmers soybeans fields, making
| weed maps and then writing prescriptions of what to spray. One
| feverish afternoon with the temperature hovering in the nineties
| I had an idea. What if we had a plane flyover, grab images and
| have a software program identify the weeds and spit out a
| prescription?
|
| I talked to some professors at Michigan State and other software
| developers I knew. The consensus was it was a great idea but the
| technology simply was not there or even remotely close.
|
| Little did I know several years later Monsanto would come out
| with genetically engineered soybeans that you could simply spray
| Roundup over. Walking fields, weed maps and prescriptions of
| chemicals became a thing of the past.
|
| To me it was an excellent example of how technology can blind
| side you at times. Now of course weeds are becoming resistant to
| Roundup and prescriptions might make a comeback!
| benibela wrote:
| I once wrote an identification app for a some trees with a
| decision tree.
|
| Then it would ask a handful of questions like, are the leaves
| jagged or round.
| mongol wrote:
| A decision tree app for car problems would be really cool. What
| is the problem? The car does not start. Etc.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Where did you get the data?
| benibela wrote:
| From my biology class in middle school. There was a
| flowchart, perhaps from a textbook.
|
| Then I had pictures for each case. Do not remember where I
| got them from
| vezycash wrote:
| @shrikant @dang
|
| Kindly edit the current title, "Pl NtNet." Change it to PlaNtNet
| if Pl@NtNet wouldn't work.
|
| Current title looks like it's about Raspberry PI.
| shrikant wrote:
| I posted it in a bit of a hurry, and couldn't think of a
| description that didn't sound like shilling the app. Looks like
| dang (or sctb?) has put in a perfect descriptor!
| stared wrote:
| How does it compare to other plant-identifying apps?
|
| (PlantSnap, PictureThis, etc)
| m-i-l wrote:
| I've just tried PlantNet for the first time. In the one case I
| tried it on, it seemed better than PlantSnap, which I installed
| a couple of weeks ago. There's a flower I've been wondering
| about for years. It looks very like a Forget-me-not, which
| grows in a number of places nearby and flowers at the same
| time, but has wider leaves. After quite a few attempts with
| PlantSnap, it came up with Chinese Hounds Tongue Forget-me-
| not[0], which sounded plausible. However, after a much smaller
| number of attempts with PlantNet, it suggested Green
| Alkanet[1], which I'm starting to think is more likely, e.g.
| due it flowering earlier and being more weed like. Not an
| expert, and I know this is only one test case, but based on
| this I'm favouring PlantNet. Looks like there will be fewer
| notifications too.
|
| [0] https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/5194/Cynoglossum-
| amabile/Detai...
|
| [1] https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=1001
| joelanman wrote:
| I've tried a bunch and plantnet is the best so far
| soco wrote:
| Agree, PlantSnap is not bad either but I still prefer
| PlantNet
| lala26in wrote:
| Very nice!
| arkanciscan wrote:
| What about mushrooms? What about slime molds? What about insects?
| Google Lens does all of the above as well as plants and flowers
| and fruit and shoes. I think PlantNet looks nice, and I
| appreciate the web-only version! But Lens is built into my
| camera, it's hard to beat.
|
| What I think would be useful is an app that could diagnose
| problems with plants. Some get yellow when dry, some get yellow
| when too wet. You could tell it the species and it could compare
| it to training data of sick plants of that species.
| spullara wrote:
| I've used PictureThis with great success.
| stev3 wrote:
| For people interested in identifying plants, the PlantCLEF
| dataset is a great start. Here's the link:
| https://www.imageclef.org/PlantCLEF2019
|
| Implement a simple image classifier built with fast.ai and you
| can go quite far!
|
| I believe it is to be used for research only.
| qxxx wrote:
| Google Lens does this. But not only for plants. And it is quite
| good. I could identify most of the plants in the park. Cool to
| know there is some edible stuff in the park like ramson
| snug wrote:
| I was going to say the same thing, I would like to see a
| comparison of the two
| dessant wrote:
| Were those ramsons flowering? Lily of the valley leaves could
| easily trick Google Lens, they would be more likely to find in
| a park, and they are deadly.
| azepoi wrote:
| The website is missing an aboutus page, what is this a company, a
| nonprofit? a project of a research institute? it's not clearly
| identified.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Agree. They act like they're doing it for public benefit and
| connected with academia but without being clear if they're a
| commercial offshoot or charitable or something else. They are
| accepting donations in a way that implies they're charitable
| but isn't backed up by clear details (although maybe it's
| buried somewhere in the site?)
|
| Whether they're planning to be open source with their data
| would be good to clarify too.
| scandox wrote:
| I've used this for a while but I'm never really sure about the
| results. Honestly I had no idea that identifying trees accurately
| could be so difficult - and I mean as a human with access to
| photographs and Wikipedia and books and other people.
| jyounker wrote:
| Yeah, it's wonderful how complicated the natural world is.
|
| We're still discovering stuff every data. Recently it was
| discovered that one of the most unique looking critters in the
| world (the mata-mata, a turtle) was actually two species.
|
| In even grander confusion, a friend of mine was working her way
| through her masters in mycology. She focused on the fungus
| Phytophthora ramorum. In the end it turned out that the
| Phytopthera aren't even fungi. They're algae, an entirely
| separate branch of the eukaryotes. It's like discovering that
| your cat is a house plant.
| beilabs wrote:
| Android app not available in the Australian play store?
| nelsonic wrote:
| Looks great. The app doesn't appear to be open source, just the
| API docs: https://github.com/plantnet Given the public funding of
| the project, wouldn't it make sense for the code to be open to
| welcome contributions/improvements from the community/users?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| iNaturalist is publicly funded, a wide collaboration, and IIRC
| mainly FOSS and Open Data. They're using machine learning and
| knowledge of users to identify flora and fauna; I've found it
| excellent at doing automatic ID at the genus level (but not
| really species).
|
| https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers
| ImaCake wrote:
| Depending on what you are interested in (and where) there
| will be plenty of enthusiastic users willing to identify your
| observations. In my experience, birds will _always_ get
| identified, while insects and plants will only sometimes
| register interest from others. I think it 's because bird
| watching is a popular hobby, while entomologists tend to be a
| rarer breed.
| Thrymr wrote:
| There are also at least 2 orders of magnitude more species
| of insects on Earth than of birds (>1 million compared with
| ~10,000). An amateur birder can know a significant fraction
| of all birds, and all of them commonly found in their
| location, while no entomologist is anywhere close to
| knowing all insects.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Absolutely, a good point. I would think for the
| particularly avid birder that you could probably memorize
| all of them. We certainly have larger vocabularies than
| that!
| rapnie wrote:
| Cool. It is a pity that Seek contains 5 trackers and is not
| available on F-Droid, though.
|
| https://reports.exodus-
| privacy.eu.org/en/reports/org.inatura...
|
| PlantNet latest only has Google Firebase Analytics as its
| single tracker.
| azepoi wrote:
| The fundation asking for donations is claiming it will be free
| and open-source
|
| > Resultats > Des logiciels gratuits et sous licence Open
| Source.
|
| [French only] https://www.agropolis-fondation.fr/Pl-ntNet
| ape4 wrote:
| Is there a training dataset for this kind of thing (with nice
| license)?
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