Shazam changed our music lovin’ lives by allowing us to find out the artist or title of virtually any song playing by letting the app “listen” and pull the info up from its database.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
But Shazam did more than just help us discover new music- it proved an app can identify a sound or pic in a flash, a function which can be used a million other ways- including to identify plant species.
The new app Pl@ntNet allows users to snap a pic of a plant and identify it in a flash, as long as it’s one of the species currently cataloged in their ever-growing database:
The app works by collecting data from a large social network which uploads pictures and information about plants. Scientists from four French research organizations including Cirad, IRA, Inria/IRD, and the Tela Botanica Network developed the app.
The app features visualization software which recognizes many plant species, provided they have been illustrated well enough in the botanical reference base. PlantNet currently works on more than 4,100 species of wild flora of the French territory, and the species list is provided through the application. The number of species included and images used by the application grows as more users contribute.
-Via Collective Evolution
Source: neatorama