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Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo
- rollulus 5y agoHow does this compare to PlantSnap and pl@ntNet?
- sails 5y agoI haven't used either, but in the UK this works incredibly well.
- Someone 5y agoOr PictureThis (https://www.picturethisai.com/ https://www.picturethisai.com/)?
- nmstoker 5y agoOr Google Lens? I've only tried Lens on various office plants (so not in the wild) but it was very effective for those
- rosetremiere 5y agoOr seek! https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
- eurasiantiger 5y agoThis is one of the best apps to install on your kids’ phones. Makes them go outside and get interested in their surroundings.
- keithnz 5y agomy partner used one called PictureThis and it identified most of all the plants around our property here in New Zealand ( mix of natives and introduced), it got ones that were a complete mystery to us.
- pmoriarty 5y agoI used to use PictureThis until they started requiring a login in order to use it. Then I switched to LeafSnap, which works great.
- cube2222 5y agoAt least for me on iOS it doesn't require a login. I too confirm that PictureThis works great.
- Liquid_Fire 5y agoFor me (Android) PictureThis requires a login, and limits you to 1 identification per day, unless you pay for a monthly subscription. It didn't use to in the past. However, the linked app (Candide) also seems to require a login, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time before they put limits on free accounts.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI have it, and they don't require a login. I use it several times a week. My main complaint about it, is that it's a battery hog; but it works well.
- cormacrelf 5y agoThis is one of those markets where even ignoring open source/etc you never need to pay for it, because at the moment there is a new plant recognition app once a fortnight with a free trial. And none of them have any real lock-in because they're basically stateless.
- acheron 5y agoI started using PictureThis recently and do not need a login or anything. Works pretty well at least in my yard and nearby parks.
- Tomte 5y agoOr Seek (iNaturalist)
- injidup 5y agoAwesome. It identified my fully grown pepper (capsicum ) plants as spinach. What could go wrong?
- chefandy 5y agoAt least it didn't identify it as "not hot dog." I wonder how much funding these guys have, and how much of it I could get by intentionally non-fatally poisoning myself with a misidentified plant? How much indemnity can the whole "WHILE WE ENDEAVOUR TO ENSURE THAT THE INFORMATION ON THE CANDIDE PLATFORM ARE CORRECT, WE DO NOT WARRANT THE ACCURACY AND COMPLETENESS [...]" thing actually provide?
- injidup 5y agoOr you could try smuggling misidentified spinach across the Mexican/USA border and see how far blaming the app gets you :)
- superkuh 5y agoI uploaded it a photo of my wild cucumber and it said it was passion fruit. But that's a completely legit mistake since I literally made the same one until it started flowering. But then I uploaded a photo of a catnip plant and it thought it was a milkweed plant. In fact, it's 0 of 4 for common plants in my garden this summer. Seems like a great idea with a marginal implementation.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI have an app on my iPhone that works pretty well (PictureThis). Probably does about the same thing as this. I noticed that the following clause in their Ts & Cs: > You grant us an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide and royalty-free right and license to use your Content for the purposes of providing, promoting, developing and trying to improve the Candide Platform and our other services, including new services that we may provide in the future. We will not sell your Content to any third party does not have punctuation after the last sentence. I'm not a Grammar Nazi[0], but that tells me that the sentence was changed at the last minute. [0] http://queenofwands.net/d/20031003.html http://queenofwands.net/d/20031003.html
- hicksyfern 5y agoI don't work at Candide any more but I was CTO there when this was written. I can assure you you're reading too much into it! Candide is very well set up to protect users' private data, and has a great set of engineers and engineering practices in place ensuring this, as well as, you know, not ever selling data to a third party!
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThanks for the clarification. I know that lawyers spend a lot of time revising these types of sentences; usually with an eye towards exit plans. I appreciate the authoritative response.
- jpxw 5y agoMy immediate thought is that this could be quite dangerous if used by inexperienced foragers. It’s very easy as a human to misidentify poison hemlock as cow’s parsley, for example, which is a lethal mistake. It’s a very cool project though, of course.
- karencarits 5y agoThere is also a free service trained on Norwegian plants: https://orakel.artsdatabanken.no/ https://orakel.artsdatabanken.no/ The final step in the user guide is (roughly translated): > Now it's your turn to think! A high match percentage is no guarantee that the result is correct. Artsorakelet tries to match your pictures to pictures it has seen previously, but many species have no, few, or bad pictures! It has not been trained on domestic animals, garden flowers or humans, or pictures with restricted access, such as images of large predators
- iliesaya 5y agohttps://plantnet.org/en/ https://plantnet.org/en/
- riffraff 5y agoI have been using plantnet for a few years and have been pretty happy with it. The ability to contribute+validate your identification is great. It does fail sometimes but it's pretty good, and the UI has improved in recent releases.
- xattt 5y agoI have to agree on PlantNet. It is good enough to come up with a general name of a plant (ragwort), that you can then look up in a local plant guidebook to find out the specific variety (common ragwort). Hopefully, a privacy-friendly phone (ie Apple) manufacturer acquires them and does deep OS integration with the app.
- codingdave 5y agoI'm not understanding why you say that being purchased by a phone manufacturer would be better - wouldn't the optimal solution be to expose any features from the OS that the app could need, while leaving the app developers their independence?
- xattt 5y agoI’m trying to understand the business model that PlantNet has. Right now, it’s obviously some sort of exploitative data harvesting - hoarding geotagged plant photos to sell to academic researchers, highlighting hotspots for nature tourism, etc. I was alluding to Apple in my comment, as they are the ones that have a model for their mobile devices being some sort of knowledge lens. They are very easily capable to eat the cost of maintaining the database without resorting to some sort of exploitative business model.
- alainv 5y ago
- lmilcin 5y agoNice concept. Unfortunately, I have tried to identify some of my plants but it could not identify correctly a single one. Just an endless procession of at best similar plants, most of the time completely dissimilar. I think this is another naive model that just tries to push entire problem to AI. That is unfortunately what I am seeing nowadays, very unimaginative. Just try to have fun with parameters of the network until you find some kind of configuration that seems to be working. What it would benefit from would be some kind of analysis/classification of basic features of the plants like what's the basic shape of the leaf, trunk, how things are connected, etc. The classification would benefit from AI (like identify where leaves are, where trunk is, etc.) but then that intel would be passed to a more classification-oriented algorithm. (disclaimer, I am not an AI developer, it just seems to me like pretty rational way to approach the problem)
- phito 5y agoRight. This kind of thing is only going to work on very common plants that are easy to ID. I am very into carnivorous plants and even us experts sometimes have trouble identifying plants, often you need very specific morphological details to ID species that a phone picture will never be able to catch. IMO this will just lead people to wrongly ID their plants more often than not, and that's a really bad thing.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoThe iNaturalist app does a spectacular job at identifying plants (and insects, fish, birds…), even disambiguating based on your location You label geotagged images with the AIs suggestion if you agree with it and then other users can either confirm or suggest a different / more specific species.
- phito 5y agoYou got me curious, so I tried that app, and I'm getting "Unknown species" for every single one of my plants... I guess no identification is better than bad identification.
- kurishutofu 5y agoThe augmented reality function that seems to allow you to label your plants seems intriguing. I wanted to try this over PicturesThis (I don’t like how PictureThis makes it look you need their subscription for the app to work) But it seems the app is not available in my region maybe because of GDPR, I guess?
- bizzleDawg 5y agoRelated to this, I've been working on a side project (https://www.hedira.io/ https://www.hedira.io/, house plant care advisor) for nearly 2 years now. We haven't gotten time to add species recognition by images, but I've done enough to know it's really hard! Thankfully, being houseplant focused, people normally have an easy time finding out what specific species they have in front of them. I made some classifiers using coreML to test the idea and as with a lot of ML problems, 90% accuracy is trivial, but it gets difficult really quickly after that. Especially without flowers (since they tend to be more unique). The simplest way I could find to add detection was to use something like the plantnet API (https://my.plantnet.org/usage https://my.plantnet.org/usage) which powers the app of a similar name. There are a couple of other plant recognition APIs worth looking at too.
- jsmorph 5y agohttps://www.inaturalist.org/ https://www.inaturalist.org/ also does this kind of thing. iNaturalist works well for lots of different organisms.
- filoeleven 5y agoIt’s apparently much nicer on Android than on iOS. I have only used their other app Seek, and while the IDs are pretty good, the UX ain’t great.
- londons_explore 5y agoHow does this perform Vs Google lens?
- perryizgr8 5y ago> This item is not available in your country. I don't understand why so many apps do this?? It's a free app, why not let me use it?
- ramesh31 5y agoThank developer laziness and GDPR
- ahhhndi 5y agoGerman research project doing same for free: https://floraincognita.com/?noredirect=en_US https://floraincognita.com/?noredirect=en_US
- _Microft 5y agoFlora Incognita is great. Very recommended!
- monkeynotes 5y agoGoogle lens does a pretty good job of identifying plants, along with everything else. I use it a lot in our garden and a majority of the time it correctly identifies.
- tgtweak 5y agoThere is really very little need for 3rd party apps on this. I've yet to stump lens on any Fauna or Flora in my neck of the woods. I suspect it is location aware, which gives it a pretty big edge in filtering out duplicates.
- raffraffraff 5y agoInteresting, I can't use Lens. Installed it, but it just says "Thank you for updating. Lens will be available soon"
- trts 5y agoMy success rate with Google Lens is about 80-90%, sometimes doing additional research to confirm between similar results. With a couple different dedicated apps I had zero success.
- Jolter 5y agoSo, what’s the monetization strategy? What data am I giving up if I use this app, and how will they use it?
- amarant 5y agoGoogle lens can already do this. It identifies other things too, which is nice. And from my very limited testing lens is more accurate. I guess this is nice for the "cancel Google" crowd though...
- endantwit 5y agoObsIdentify identifies both plants and animals. Works way better than I'd have ever imagined! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.observation.obsidentify https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.observatio...
- kyrra 5y agoNot available in the US?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- olivierlacan 5y agoUnderstandably people are realizing that it's now much easier to discover what plants (and animals, and fungus, etc.) exist around you and whether they're special in some way. But when picking apps to accomplish that task, I suggest selecting for those that respect your privacy (because a lot of these plant observations involve GPS location), are clear about how the machine learning datasets are trained and what's being done with the data you're supplying, and lastly how these apps and companies are funded. PictureThis is owned by https://www.glority.com https://www.glority.com Candide appears to be a UK startup: https://candidegardening.com/GB/about https://candidegardening.com/GB/about iNaturalist and their Seek app (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app) is a joint venture between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about Moreover both iNaturalist (https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist) and Seek (https://github.com/inaturalist/SeekReactNative https://github.com/inaturalist/SeekReactNative) are open source. The former is a Rails app, and the latter a React Native app with no account registration system making it safe and legal to use for children since all observations are stored in-device by default unless you chose to send them to your iNaturalist account to share with the community. On functionality alone it's extremely rare for Seek not to recognize an organism (yeah, it's not just plants) and when it is, I simply send the observation to iNaturalist whose network of naturalists both amateur and professional usually manage to definitively identify my observations within a few hours. Here's a recent example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86844469 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86844469 The iNaturalist community itself is fascinating and quite transparent with detailed site stats (https://www.inaturalist.org/stats https://www.inaturalist.org/stats) and a clear mission statement ( https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/what+is+it https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/what+is+it): > iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature At a time where biodiversity is more threatened than ever, I welcome any tool to help folks identify and value the organisms around us, but if you're going to pick one, my recommendation is iNat & Seek. PS: I'm not affiliated to iNaturalist in any way other than as a happy user.
- tkahnoski 5y agoSeek is AWESOME. We discovered it late in 2020 but it raised the bar for all our outdoor excursions with the kids. Even a routine walk around the neighborhood is an enriched experience as the kids careful observe their surrounding looking for a new bug or flower. The only downside is when we get to a new place I have to remind the kids we can't stop every minute to 'Seek' something otherwise we'll never get back home!
- yepthatsreality 5y agoWhat ever happened to dichotomous keys?
- pvaldes 5y agoWere replaced for something worse, more primitive and less accurate. Sign of the times.
- jiehong 5y agoOr just have actual botanists identify the plants for you (while helping gathering data for AI later): https://www.flowerchecker.com/ https://www.flowerchecker.com/ You get a confidence factor, a link to its wiki page, and you can even send a special message with the pictures to help clarify things.
- antirez 5y agoTry Plantnet, it's free and is a research project. Works really well. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.plantnet&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.plantnet&h...
- davgard 5y agoI have tried Plantnet; it works as expected. But looking through the website, I might give this one a try and compare it to Plantnet to see who's better.
- neves 5y agoHow is this better than Inaturalist? https://www.inaturalist.org/ https://www.inaturalist.org/
- SeanFerree 5y agoThis is an excellent resource!
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- kazinator 5y agoGoogle's camera app does this in the Lens mode. I snapped picture of the example picture; it came up with Swiss Cheese Plant. Don't know how good it is. I've used it maybe seven or eight times in the past for identifying plants; it worked every time. Most recently, over just this past weekend, it identified an Elm tree from a shot a branch.
- fiddleleaf 5y agoSo like Google Lens but not cross-platform
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- a9h74j 5y agoNot precisely on topic, but two professors at U.C. Berkely are involved in helping people identify edible plants in urban settings, particularly Oakland. This excellent piece makes mention of a phone app they are using in conjunction. https://phys.org/news/2014-11-foragers-bounty-edibles-urban-food.html https://phys.org/news/2014-11-foragers-bounty-edibles-urban-...
- tygrak 5y agoI use plant.id for this and it actually seemed to give me correct identifications every time I used it so far.
- Sophistifunk 5y ago"This app is not available in your country or region"
- Vivtek 5y agoWell, it gets easy ones pretty well - misidentified arabica coffee as robusta but did at least get "coffee", and identified a mango tree - but tricky ones (the various weed trees on our farm) are even more hopeless than my own efforts. To be fair, it's probably for houseplants more than anything. On the other hand, half the stuff growing on a tropical farm is houseplants. Wish there were more information about their model.