
PlantNet – App that helps identify plants from pictures - shrikant
https://plantnet.org/en/
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AnonC
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](https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app)

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wiremaus
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
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? :)

~~~
TaylorAlexander
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
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_print)

~~~
homerowilson
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.

~~~
yostrovs
It's mostly visual. I would add location and latest weather to any software
trying to recognize the mushroom. The mushrooms that people commonly forage
for are not that numerous, so the algorithm needs to know about a dozen or two
varieties. Chanterelles are easy to tell from images. You can probably have an
AI chanterelle identifier coded right now and for most edible mushrooms very
soon if not now.

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nelsonic
Looks great. The app doesn't appear to be open source, just the API docs:
[https://github.com/plantnet](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?

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pbhjpbhj
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](https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers)

~~~
ImaCake
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
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
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!

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qxxx
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

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snug
I was going to say the same thing, I would like to see a comparison of the two

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pvaldes
Ramson smells like garlic, anything herbaceous that smells like garlic when
cut fresh is Allium. Is a pretty unmistakable genus.

Something that does not smell exactly like garlic can be Allium also, like
Onions.

Convallaria has runners also so it forms thick mat roots. Leaves stand in a
different angle. In Bear's garlic each plant is individual.

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snug
Thanks, I meant of Google Lens. I am going to have to try ramsom though

~~~
pvaldes
Start with the flowers to avoid any risk. Are edible also. Then you will
recognize easily the same flavour in leaves.

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wiremaus
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/](https://wildflowersearch.org/) to help verify
that you have the correct species.

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Fiahil
For french speakers, you can follow the Tela Botanica Mooc on botanic here :
[https://mooc.tela-botanica.org/course/view.php?id=12](https://mooc.tela-
botanica.org/course/view.php?id=12)

~~~
clemParis
Thanks!

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kekebo
Semi related: goes well with
[https://birdnet.cornell.edu/](https://birdnet.cornell.edu/) for bird song
identification.

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rmason
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!

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tipoftheiceberg
Prescription maps and Precision Agriculture are most certainly alive and well.

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scandox
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.

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jyounker
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.

~~~
pvaldes
> In the end it turned out that the Phytopthera aren't even fungi.

What? those %&$#!!! things are classified as public enemy!

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growt
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)

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philote
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.

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nateburke
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.

~~~
pvaldes
oak genus is easy to recognize. The species level can be a nigthmare.

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underyx
I've been using [https://plant.id/](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!

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arkanciscan
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.

~~~
pvaldes
(it seems that replacement of taxonomists with robots is going full steam
ahead...)

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stared
How does it compare to other plant-identifying apps?

(PlantSnap, PictureThis, etc)

~~~
joelanman
I've tried a bunch and plantnet is the best so far

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soco
Agree, PlantSnap is not bad either but I still prefer PlantNet

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praveen9920
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

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dylan604
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".

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azepoi
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.

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nmstoker
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.

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benibela
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.

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eternauta3k
Where did you get the data?

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benibela
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

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xvilka
Reminds me of a similar project - Diatoms[1].

[1] [https://diatoms.org/](https://diatoms.org/)

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spullara
I've used PictureThis with great success.

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stev3
For people interested in identifying plants, the PlantCLEF dataset is a great
start. Here's the link:
[https://www.imageclef.org/PlantCLEF2019](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.

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habosa
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

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detaro
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?

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MKais
"Nozha Boujemaa is the scientific co-leader with Daniel Barthelemy (CIRAD) of
Pl@ntNet project"

[https://project.inria.fr/nozhaboujemaa/](https://project.inria.fr/nozhaboujemaa/)

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drchewbacca
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.

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CarVac
Google Lens has done this decently for me in the past.

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ape4
Is there a training dataset for this kind of thing (with nice license)?

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beilabs
Android app not available in the Australian play store?

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varshithr
Please forgive me. A Shazam for plants?

~~~
stev3
Yes, exactly. :-)

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vezycash
@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
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!

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101008
I misread it as "identify planets from your pictures" :)

