Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Botantical classification is interesting but difficult. Once trained, it's fast enough, but can "deep learning" be anywhere near accurate enough?

I'd guess there'd be a focus on salient botantical features for classification, and perhaps the human can be enlisted to circle them out. There could be a "twenty questions"-type narrowing down, perhaps using images.



Dichotomous keys are the standard in taxonomy for species identification since centuries. It's basically a binary search tree, generated by hand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-access_key


Dichotomous keys are mostly useless when you deal with photos. For some reason people always find the most useless chamera position when taking photos to unknown plants.


chamera -> camera


I wonder too how much geolocation could pare things down, provided it's not invasive/introduced species.


That's a two-edged sword; I've seen a few birds which, if the range diagrams in my field guides are to be believed, have no business being anywhere near where I am, and were probably up to no good. Granted plants move less quickly, but I'd hesitate to put all that much weight on location all the same.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: