Short Summary
Four years ago, we (just a bunch of PhD. students back then) have built a professional service for plant identification called FlowerChecker. Basically, people can upload their mystery plant and let professional botanists identify it. Although this service has worked great up to now, we aim to reach a new goal: automate the identification process using a modern tool: artificial intelligence.
Why?
- We do not want to burden experts with queries about common plants.
- There are already other apps for automated plant identification, but they are not very reliable -- we want to change that.
- We want to offer a free product; we believe that once the machines can do the hard work, the end-customers should not be charged for the service.
- We want to show off a bit ;)
- For business customers, there will be a paid version with application interface; this makes Plant.id financially sustainable in the long term
What We Already Have
-
learning data - more than 500 thousand of labeled images from the FlowerChecker service.
-
machine-learning code - based on Google's Tensorflow deep learning framework, we have created a demo on FB Messenger, check it out: http://bot.flowerchecker.com (it's written with Python)
-
working service we and to keep running and make it event better
So What Do We Need?
Resources to keep the servers running until the service will be financially sustainable. That's why the current limit in beta is just 5 plant identifications per week. But you can increase that with some campaign perks, this also helps us to scale up our infrastructure.
Also, to exploit the full potential of the neural network, we we would like to run the training process on cloud-based GPU infrastructure so we can reach the maximum reliability of the identification process.
How the Service Looks Like?
Check this http://plant.id and send us an opinion about what we should we add or improve :)
The Impact
No more botanical guides or begging for plant identification in anonymous forums. With plant.id, will be also able to skip unreliable or paid mobile apps.
This is not only about satisfying our curiosity about some mystery plant in our garden. Plant.id can serve as an educational tool, too. This will give people not only the name of the plant, but also a Wikipedia link so that people can find out additional information, such as the plant's role in the ecosystem. By educating people, we can help fighting against invasive plants or help biodiversity conservation.
Risks & Challenges
We want to deliver plant.id this summer -- the end of June. Feel free to check our long tech talk on machine learning system to assess our capability to face this challenge.
Other Ways You Can Help
If you can't support our project financially, just wait until it's ready and use it :).
