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Comment by dotsam | Hacker News Reader

BirdNet is great and has helped me to identify some birdsong. If you are also interested in identifying plants, PlantNet is good too. https://identify.plantnet.org/

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Any comparison of PlantNet to iNaturalist[0] (regarding quality of the product / size of the community)? I use iNat frequently for identifying native plants and animals around the yard and it's been extremely helpful and active (I typically get at least one verification on each item I post, oftentimes two or three).

[0] https://www.inaturalist.org/

The local app here for native plants (Obsidentify) beats PlantNet for me, but I have the impression there might be some 'user experience' into play: I know enough about plants to know what the distinctive features are and I know enough about the app/AI to know that it wants properly cropped pictures with those features, and other users whos observations have the most chance of being validated and accepted do so as well. So the thing is probably very well trained for that, which is less the case for PlantNet. Again, that is just a theory, but when talking with other people the story is similar: the people saying it doesn't work for them are typically uploading non-cropped and/or non-identifying pictures.

Try talking to BirdNet, it'll tell you species = homo sapiens. Most plant recognition apps will stil try to match a plant when feeding it pictures of humans.

"Breakthrough: AI Research Proves Once And For All That Humans Are Birds, Not Plants!"

Probably a good reason for this. A lot of images of plants are in hands of humans (just checked PlantNET db) - i guess ML is modeled to ignore humans.

That could be one aspect, but I was actually talking about taking pictures of complete persons. Usually turns out you're a beetle, or a worm, or a butterfly :)

These new ML image identifiers are neat and they're sure to become the default method, but I feel like a "20 questions" style of tool could have worked very well for a long time with little technology required.

Just ask a series of questions:

- Is it a plant or animal?

- How large is it?

- Where are you (location permission)

- Does it have green leaves?

- Does it have woody stems?

- Does it have whorled or alternate leaves? (Show images)

- Does it have yellow flowers?

This is how a lot of field guide books work, but they require a lot of flipping back and forth, scanning tables of contents, and memorizing terminology. An app could just be tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, drilling down very quickly and showing images at every step.

The "only" difficulty is getting the database of attributes - maybe it already exists. Maybe an app like this already exists and I haven't been able to find it?

Having used such books, I don't think it is that simple. I mean you could make an app just like the books but it might not add any functionality and as such not be usable for the wide public.

Thing is, the series your questions you show are easy to answer but they don't get you any further than halfway. Problem is in the questions you do not show: there it starts going into details, terminolgy starts to matter (seriously, if you've never read those words it's like a foreign language) and differences become hard to spot. Part of this could perhaps be alleviated with pictures but I doubt it; I've seen websites attempt it but none were really good and they all did a subset of plants. Probably because it's quite the amount of work to do them all, even for a region.

While I really like Plantnet, I much prefer https://floraincognita.com/ (which is an actual research project).

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