A collaborative and distributed identification tool for plants

Abstract

We are developing a website/smartphone application where users can deposit pictures of plants. Volunteers can then answer questions relating to these pictures: text questions, or drawing comparisons, or comparisons with other pictures. When sufficient data are available (50 or 100 of such answers) we can then propose an identification. The volunteers give answers based on “naive” observations of plant details. Example on a flower: do you see 3 petals, 4 petals, 5-8 petals, many petals ? For leaves, we display a small set of drawings, the set changes when the firsts questions provide sufficient information. To finish the identification, we allow for direct comparison with other pictures of similar detail. The questions are inside Iframe, and so are easily included on a network of participating web sites. Depending on the total number of visits to these sites, we shall have identifications within a few minutes or a few hours. We have now a set of 300 plants which are well-know in France. An important point about the method is that the volunteers help to classify the pictures we have as well as new pictures, so that the system is bootstrapping and scales easily. Moreover, we can easily experiment with new questions or drawings, to find those that reduce entropy most rapidly.