Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrgreenfur | Hacker News Reader

When can we get this for identifying plants/animals/rocks/fungus/etc in the wild? Would love this on a phone when hiking.

View on HN

For fungus you could try https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pingou.cha... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/champignouf/id1227854971

I made it as an experiment, results vary and can be awfully wrong but it's funny to see the confusions the neural network can make. Funny until somebody eat a deadly mushroom because of me, I guess. I already put plenty of warnings, so fingers crossed, but it's hard to be sure it won't be misused.

This is an interesting problem that almost all guide book authors have to contend with, bringing knowledge of a topic may expose people to risk, but I think it's maybe a false conclusion.

It's a given all guides have false information, it then begs the question are guides worse than no guides? I think this can be easily answered more information is better.

You can give people information but you can't understand it for them.

kudos for making the app :)

What do you think your app would identify this as? Carpet mushroom? http://imgur.com/a/Rqc64

Me too.

I volunteered at Audubon for a decade. I've got all the books, charts. I hike and camp. I can't identify rocks, birds, fish, trees, clouds, etc to save my life.

Square peg, round hole.

I've always been incredibly curious about all the life around me but at the age of 35 it finally started to bug me that I had no idea what, for example, the dozens of types of birds around me were called. For the past few months I've started making it a point to identify every single bird that I see around the yard, to spend a few minutes locating a photo of it and listening to its call and reading information about it on Wikipedia. Just in the past few months I've identified over two dozen birds that I grew up seeing and hearing and now I finally know what they're called.

What I'm realizing is that it takes active participation and interest in indentifying things to really learn their names and their histories, not just a passing interest.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a site [1] and an app that is amazing for identifying birds. My favorite feature is how it also lists birds that are similar, which makes it a lot easier to find the specific bird you're looking for. I then compare visual information with the auditory information of the birds calls to make a concrete identification.

1. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/search/

It will likely require internet access which is less likely to be available in remote areas.

this is made with convnets. so just point me to a dataset with a thousand examples per type, and I'll give you a working app in days. of course, finding and preparing that data is the real challenge

I would love to hear the details of what your process is on developing that.

I am not sure I even know enough to ask the right questions on this. But what tools, languages, computing resources, etc do you use?

This [1] is a good start. You'll probably feel like you're drinking from the firehose though.

[1: https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/image_recognition]

I think it'd have to allow users to submit images for the first few years, so that it can build up the sample set.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com