Jan 2023: New app allows easy identification of all NZ plants, animals and fungi
Jan 2023: New app allows easy identification of all NZ plants, animals and fungi
Imagine being able to readily identify every plant and bird in your garden, on a hike or when showing off our beautiful country to visiting family and friends.
This is from a few months ago but really interesting work from some university students that trained a popular machine learning model on data from iNaturalist.nz. The app is pretty good at identifying endemic species. The entire model is installed with the app which means that it works offline.
The Android version, which wasn't ready when that story was written, is now on the Play Store. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
Edit: Just tried it with a Tarata and it guessed it with 100% confidence. And it's free. Cool.
That's cool! It sounds like you've given it a go, have you compared to international apps like PlantSnap to see if it gives better results given it's only looking for NZ species?
I hadn't heard about iNaturalist until I visited an exhibition at the Puke Ariki museum in New Plymouth that explains a project to classify species off the Taranaki coast and the publish everything on iNaturalist.
I haven't tested it against international apps. This app uses EfficientNetV2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00298
There is a web version available too: https://what-is-this.cms.waikato.ac.nz/
It seems to fail on pictures of elephants so maybe it isn't trained on everything in the world...
Fails on the elephant test? That's kinda funny
I love that it's all working locally, does it handle plants as well? (All the images show animals)
This reminds me of an NZ Birds app that disappeared a few years ago that I used to love. It had recordings of their calls which was wonderful.
What happens if you point it at Brian Tamaki?
It will tell us what species his hair is